A Call Centre or Call Center

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A call centre or call center[1] is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and

transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a

company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries fromconsumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt

collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of  letters, faxes,

live chat, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact centre.

A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call centreagents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a  telephone set/headset 

connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be

independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporatecomputer network , including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the

voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies

called computer telephony integration (CTI).

Most major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers. Examples include

utility companies, mail order catalogue retailers, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call

centres. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.

A contact centre, also known as customer interaction center is a central point of anyorganization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers,

valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be

tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationshipmanagement (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting

online, visiting websites, faxing and even instant messaging .

•

[edit] Technology

An Indian call centre

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Call centre technology is subject to improvements and innovations. Some of these

technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level

of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of   best practices from past

interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent

 productivity and customer satisfaction.[2]

Automatic lead selection or lead steering is alsointended to improve efficiencies,[3] both for inbound and outbound campaigns, whereby

inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task,

whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in, aswell as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what

type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors

and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead. The concept of 

the Universal Queue standardises the processing of communications across multipletechnologies such as fax, phone, and email whilst the concept of a Virtual queue provides

callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle

inbound call demand.

Premise-based Call Center Technology Historically, call centers have been built onPBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the call center operator. The PBX might

 provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and

skills-based routing. The call center operator would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor.

Virtual Call Center Technology[4] With the advent of the Software as a service

technology delivery model, the virtual call center has emerged. In a virtual call center 

model, the call center operator does not own, operate or host the equipment that the callcenter runs on. Instead, they subscribe to a service for a monthly or annual fee with a

service provider that hosts the call center telephony equipment in their own data center.Such a vendor may host many call centers on their equipment. Agents connect to thevendor's equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, or over  Voice over IP.

Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or terminate at the vendor's data

center, rather than at the call center operator's premise. The vendor's telephony equipmentthen connects the calls to the call center operator's agents.

[edit] Patents

Call centre floor during shift.

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There are a large number of   patents covering various aspects of call centre operation,

automation, and technology. One of the early inventors in this field,  Ronald A. Katz,

 personally holds over 50 patents covering inventions related to toll free numbers,automated attendant, automated call distribution, voice response unit, computer telephone

integration and speech recognition.[5].

A report on the performance of an outbound call centre agent.

[edit] Dynamics

Types of calls are often divided into outbound and inbound . Inbound calls are calls that

are made by the consumer to obtain information, report a malfunction, or ask for help.These calls are substantially different from outbound calls, where agents place calls to

 potential customers mostly with intentions of selling or service to the individual. (Seetelemarketing  ). It is possible to combine inbound and outbound campaigns[6].

Call centre staff are often organised into a multi-tier support system for a more efficient

handling of calls. The first tier in such a model consists of operators, who direct inquiriesto the appropriate department and provide general directory information. If a caller 

requires more assistance, the call is forwarded to the second tier, where most issues can

 be resolved. In some cases, there may be three or more tiers of support staff. If a caller requires more assistance, the caller is forwarded to the third tier of support; typically the

third tier of support is formed by product engineers/developers or highly skilled technical

support staff of the product.

Call centres have their critics, some of which argue that the work atmosphere in such an

environment is de-humanising.[7] Others point to the low rates of pay and restrictive

working practices of some employers.[8][9] There has been much controversy over such

things as restricting the amount of time that an employee can spend in the toilet. [10]

Furthermore, call centres have been the subject of complaints by callers who find the

staff often do not have enough skill or authority to resolve problems,[11] while the

dehumanised workers very often exhibit an attitude of apathy to even the most abusivecustomer.[12]

Owing to the highly technological nature of the operations in such offices, the close

monitoring of staff activities is easy and widespread.[13] This can be argued to be

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 beneficial,[14] to enable the company to better plan the workload and time of its

employees. Some people have argued that such close monitoring breaches human rights

to privacy.[15]

[edit] Varieties

Some variations [16] of call centre models are listed below:

• Contact centre – Supports interaction with customers over a variety of media,

including but not necessarily limited to telephony, e-mail and internet chat.

•  Inbound call centre - Exclusively or predominantly handles inbound calls (calls

initiated by the customer).

• Outbound call centre - One in which call centre agents make outbound calls to

customers or sales leads.•  Blended call centre - Combining automatic call distribution for incoming calls

with predictive dialling for outbound calls, it makes more efficient use of agent

time as each type of agent (inbound or outbound) can handle the overflow of theother.

[edit] Criticism and performance

This article's Criticism or Controversy section(s) may mean the article does not

present a neutral point of view of the subject. It may be better to integrate thematerial in those sections into the article as a whole.

Criticisms of call centres generally follow a number of common themes, from both

callers and call centre staff. From callers, common criticisms include:[17]

• Operators working from a script

•  Non-expert operators (call screening)

• Incompetent or untrained operators incapable of processing customers' requests

effectively[18] 

• Overseas location, with language and accent problems

• Touch tone menu systems and automated queuing systems

• Excessive waiting times to be connected to an operator 

• Complaints that departments of companies do not engage in communication with

one another 

• Deceit over location of call centre (such as allocating overseas workers falseEnglish names)

• Requiring the caller to repeat the same information multiple times

Common criticisms from staff include:[19]

• Close scrutiny by management (e.g. frequent random call monitoring)

• Low compensation (pay and bonuses)

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• Restrictive working practices (some operators are required to follow a pre-written

script)

• High stress: a common problem associated with front-end jobs where employeesdeal directly with customers

• Repetitive job task 

•

Poor working conditions (e.g. poor facilities, poor maintenance and cleaning,cramped working conditions, management interference, lack of privacy and

noisy)

• Impaired vision and hearing problems

• Rude and abusive customers--especially callers who ask, "Is this the answering

service?" (Most operators are not allowed to disclose this.)

The net-net of these concerns is that call centres as a business process exhibit

stratospheric levels of variability. The experience a customer gets and the results acompany achieves on a given call are almost totally dependent on the quality of the agent

answering that call.[20] Call centres are beginning to address this by using agent-assisted

voice solutions to standardise the process all agents use.

[21]

Anton and Phelps have provided a detailed HOWTO to conduct the performance evaluation of the business,[22] 

whereas others are using various scientific technologies to do the jobs.[23][24][25] However 

more popular alternatives are using personality and skill based approaches.[26][27] The

various challenges encountered by call operators are discussed by several authors.[28][29][30]

[31][32]

[edit] Unionisation

Unions in North America have made some effort to gain members from this sector,[33]

including the Communications Workers of America[34]  and the United Steelworkers. In

Australia, the Call Centre Workers Union represents unionised workers; their activitiesform part of the Australian labour movement.[35] In Europe, Uni Global Union of 

Switzerland is involved in assisting unionisation in this realm.[36]

[edit] Standardisation

Currently, there are no universally bracketable international standards, other than ISO

9000 series, available for the industry to follow up. However, some of the relevant

standards are loosely published by ISO with the division of ICS 33.040.35 [37]. Most of the standards under this division have not been reviewed thoroughly, but there are some

guidelines and standing operating procedures available on the internet.[38]

[edit] Mathematical theory

Queuing theory is a branch of mathematics in which models of queuing systems have been developed. A call centre can be seen as a queuing network. [39][40] The models can be

applied to answer queueing questions for call centres.

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Call centre operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queueing,

with operations research, which considers a wide range of optimisation problems.

[