A call center is a centralized place or office where receiving and transmitting of information in large volume by telephone is carried out. It is always operated by a company that administers all the incoming product support or customer inquiries. There are various kinds of call centers such as an outbound call center that is operated for telemarketing, debt collections, and market research. Such call centers that collect letters, fax, social media, emails and live support software is called a contact center.
The operation of a call center is through an extensive open workspace for the agents and it contains a computer for each agent in a call center, a headset or a telephone that is connected to a telecom switch and supervisor station. Call centers can operate independently or networked with other call centers. The networked ones are more often linked to a corporate computer network which includes mainframes, Local Area Networks (LANs) and microcomputers. The voice and data pathways going into and out of the center are linked through Computer Technology Integration (CTI), which is a set of new technologies.
A call center also has a contact center or customer interaction center, which is a central point for any organization where management of all the customer contacts is done. Valuable or important information about the company is always passed through the contact centers to the appropriate people because it enables tracking of contacts and gathering of data. In the modern world, customers are contacted by email, online chat, fax, telephone, and even instant messages and vice versa.
Due to the increased improvements in innovation in the technology sector, call centers have come up with such technologies as speech recognition software that allows computers to handle first level customer support, natural language processing that allows a better customer handling and text mining. These technologies have led to improvements in agent productivity and customer satisfaction.
Historically, call centers were built using PBX equipment which is owned by the call center operator. PBX provides various functions such as interactive voice response, automatic call distribution and skills-based routing. The maintenance of PBX is under the call center operator which ensures that there is necessary software upgrades updated as it is being released by the vendor.
Finally, virtual call center technology has emerged due to the advent of the software as a service delivery model. Virtual call centers are not owned by center operators, neither do they operate or equip it. They only offer a service provider that hosts the call center telephony equipment that is in their own data centers. Virtual call centers allows people to work from home as compared to a traditional call center location that used to be centralized.
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