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A call centre ( Commonwealth spelling) or call center (
American spelling Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American ...
; see spelling differences) is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a
company A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of people, whether natural, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared go ...
to administer incoming product or service support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are usually operated for sales purposes such as
telemarketing Telemarketing (sometimes known as inside sales, or telesales in the UK and Ireland) is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent ...
, for solicitation of charitable or
political donations Campaign finance, also known as election finance or political donations, refers to the funds raised to promote candidates, political parties, or policy initiatives and referendums. Political parties, charitable organizations, and political act ...
, debt collection, market research, emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs
blood banks A blood bank is a center where blood gathered as a result of blood donation is stored and preserved for later use in blood transfusion. The term "blood bank" typically refers to a department of a hospital usually within a Clinical Pathology labora ...
. A contact centre is a further extension to call centres telephony based capabilities, administers centralised handling of individual communications, including
letter Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
s,
fax Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...
es,
live support software A web chat is a system that allows users to communicate in real-time using easily accessible web interfaces. It is a type of Internet online chat distinguished by its simplicity and accessibility to users who do not wish to take the time to insta ...
, social media,
instant message Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...
, and email. A call center was previously seen to be an open workspace for call center agents, with workstations that include a computer and display for each agent and connected to an inbound/outbound call management system, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputer/servers and
LANs Lans or LANS may refer to: Places * Lans, Tyrol, a municipality in Tyrol, Austria * Lake Lans, a lake near Lans, Tyrol France * Lans, Saône-et-Loire * Lans-en-Vercors, a community near Grenoble in the Vercors * Villard-de-Lans, a community an ...
. The contact center is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information can be routed to the appropriate people or systems, contacts can be tracked and data may be gathered. It is generally a part of the company's
customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a r ...
infrastructure. The majority of large companies use contact centers as a means of managing their customer interactions. These centers can be operated by either an in-house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third-party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres).


History

Answering services, as known in the 1960s through the 1980s, earlier and slightly later, involved a business that specifically provided the service. Primarily by the use of an
off-premises extension {{Unreferenced, date=December 2009 An off-premises extension (OPX), sometimes also known as off-premises station (OPS), is an extension telephone at a location distant from its servicing exchange. One type of off-premises extension, connected to ...
(OPX) for each subscribing business, connected at a switchboard at the answering service business, the answering service would answer the otherwise unattended phones of the subscribing businesses with a live operator. The live operator could take messages or relay information, doing so with greater human interactivity than a mechanical answering machine. Although undoubtedly more costly (the human service, the cost of setting up and paying the phone company for the OPX on a monthly basis), it had the advantage of being more ready to respond to the unique needs of after-hours callers. The answering service operators also had the option of calling the client and alerting them to, particularly important calls. The origins of call centers date back to the 1960s with the UK-based Birmingham Press and Mail, which installed Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX) to have rows of agents handling customer contacts. By 1973, call centers received mainstream attention after Rockwell International patented its Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor (GACD) for a telephone booking system as well as the popularization of telephone headsets as seen on televised
NASA Mission Control Center NASA's Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center (MCC-H, initially called Integrated Mission Control Center, or IMCC), also known by its radio callsign, Houston, is the facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, t ...
events. During the late 1970s, call center technology expanded to include telephone sales, airline reservations, and banking systems. The term "call center" was first published and recognised by the '' Oxford English Dictionary'' in 1983. The 1980s experienced the development of toll-free telephone numbers to increase the efficiency of agents and overall call volume. Call centers increased with the deregulation of
long-distance calling In telecommunications, a long-distance call (U.S.) or trunk call (also known as a toll call in the U.K. ) is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rat ...
and growth in information-dependent industries. As call centres expanded, unionisation occurred in North America to gain members including the
Communications Workers of America The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is the largest communications and media labor union in the United States, representing about 700,000 members in both the private and public sectors (also in Canada and Puerto Rico). The union has 27 ...
and the United Steelworkers. In Australia, the
National Union of Workers The National Union of Workers was an Australian trade union formed in 1989. History The National Union of Workers of Australia was formed by a progressive amalgamation of unions from 1989 onwards in a time when all Australian unions were merging ...
represents unionised workers; their activities form part of the Australian labour movement. In Europe, Uni Global Union of Switzerland is involved in assisting unionisation in this realm and in Germany Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft represents call centre workers. During the 1990s, call centres expanded internationally and developed into two additional subsets of communication, contact centres, and outsourced bureau centres. A contact centre is defined as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies, and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for the customer and organization. In contrast to in-house management, outsourced bureau contact centres are a model of contact centre that provide services on a "pay per use" model. The overheads of the contact centre are shared by many clients, thereby supporting a very cost effective model, especially for low volumes of calls. The modern contact centre includes automated call blending of inbound and outbound calls as well as predictive dialing capabilities dramatically increasing agents productivity. Latest implementations with more complex systems, require highly skilled operational and management staff that can use multichannel online and offline tools to improve customer interactions.


Technology

Call centre technologies include:
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the mai ...
software which allowed Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to handle first levels of
customer support Customer support is a range of services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. Reg ...
,
text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...
,
natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
to allow better customer handling, agent training via interactive scripting and automatic mining using
best practices A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to other known alternatives because it often produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing ...
from past interactions,
support automation Customer support is a range of services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. Reg ...
and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns. This allows inbound calls to be directly routed to the appropriate agent for the task, whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in. For outbound calls, lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors, past performance, and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead. The universal queue standardises the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email. The
virtual queue Virtual queue is a concept used in inbound call centers. Call centers use an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) to distribute incoming calls to specific resources (agents) in the center. ACDs hold queued calls in First In, First Out order until agen ...
provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.


Premises-based technology

Historically, call centres have been built on
Private branch exchange A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX). A business telephone syst ...
(PBX) equipment owned, hosted, and maintained by the call centre operator. The PBX can provide functions such as
automatic call distribution An automated call distribution system, commonly known as automatic call distributor (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs direct calls based ...
,
interactive voice response Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interac ...
, and
skills-based routing Skills-based routing (SBR), or skills-based call routing, is a call-assignment strategy used in call centres to assign incoming calls to the most suitable agent, instead of simply choosing the next available agent. It is an enhancement to the automa ...
.


Virtual call centre

In a virtual call centre model, the call centre operator (business) pays a monthly or annual fee to a vendor that hosts the call centre telephony and data equipment in their own facility, cloud-based. In this model, the operator does not own, operate or host the equipment on which the call centre runs. Agents connect to the vendor's equipment through traditional
PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides infrastructure and services for public telecommunication. The PSTN is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local teleph ...
telephone lines, or over voice over IP. Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or terminate at the vendor's data centre, rather than at the call centre operator's premises. The vendor's telephony equipment (at times data servers) then connects the calls to the call centre operator's agents. Virtual call centre technology allows people to work from home or any other location instead of in a traditional, centralised, call centre location, which increasingly allows people 'on the go' or with physical or other disabilities to work from desired locations - i.e. not leaving their house. The only required equipment is Internet access, a workstation, and a softphone. If the virtual call centre software utilizes webRTC, a softphone is not required to dial. The companies are preferring Virtual Call Centre services due to cost advantage. Companies can start their call centre business immediately without installing the basic infrastructure like Dialer, ACD and IVRS. Virtual call centres became increasingly used after the COVID-19 pandemic restricted businesses from operating with large groups of people working in close proximity.


Cloud computing

Through the use of
application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...
s (APIs), hosted and on-demand call centres that are built on cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) platforms can integrate their functionality with cloud-based applications for
customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a r ...
(CRM), lead management and more. Developers use APIs to enhance cloud-based call centre platform functionality—including
Computer telephony integration Computer telephony integration, also called computer–telephone integration or CTI, is a common name for any technology that allows interactions on a telephone and a computer to be coordinated. The term is predominantly used to describe desktop ...
(CTI) APIs which provide basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling from a separate application, and configuration APIs which enable graphical user interface (GUI) controls of administrative functions. Call centres that use cloud computing use software that Gartner refers to as "Contact Center as a Solution" (or CCaaS, for short) that Gartner defines as "a software as a service (SaaS)-based application that enables customer service organizations to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically in terms of both customer experience and employee experience".


Outsourcing

Outsourced call centres are often located in
developing countries A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agree ...
, where wages are significantly lower. These include the call centre industries in the Philippines,
Bangladesh Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the mos ...
, and India. Companies that regularly utilise outsourced contact centre services include
British Sky Broadcasting Sky UK Limited is a British broadcaster and telecommunications company that provides television and broadband Internet services, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is a subsidiary of ...
and
Orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower *Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum * ...
in the telecommunications industry,
Adidas Adidas AG (; stylized as adidas since 1949) is a German multinational corporation, founded and headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, that designs and manufactures shoes, clothing and accessories. It is the largest sportswear manufactur ...
in the sports and leisure sector,
Audi Audi AG () is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. As a subsidiary of its parent company, the Volkswagen Group, Audi produces vehicles in nine production facilities worldwide. The o ...
in car manufacturing and charities such as the RSPCA.


Industries


Healthcare

The healthcare industry has used outbound call centre programmes for years to help manage billing, collections, and patient communication. The inbound call centre is a new and increasingly popular service for many types of healthcare facilities, including large hospitals. Inbound call centres can be outsourced or managed in-house. These healthcare call centres are designed to help streamline communications, enhance patient retention and satisfaction, reduce expenses and improve operational efficiencies.


Hospitality

Many large hospitality companies such as the Hilton Hotels Corporation and Marriott International make use of call centres to manage reservations. These are known in the industry as "central reservations offices". Staff members at these call centres take calls from clients wishing to make reservations or other inquiries via a public number, usually a
1-800 number A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefi ...
. These centres may operate as many as 24 hours per day, seven days a week, depending on the call volume the chain receives.


Evaluation


Mathematical theory

Queueing theory is a branch of mathematics in which models of service systems have been developed. A call centre can be seen as a queueing network and results from queueing theory such as the probability an arriving customer needs to wait before starting service useful for provisioning capacity. ( Erlang's C formula is such a result for an
M/M/c queue In queueing theory, a discipline within , the queue (or Erlang–T model) is a multi-server queueing model. In Kendall's notation it describes a system where arrivals form a single queue and are governed by a , there are servers, and job service t ...
and approximations exist for an M/G/k queue.) Statistical analysis of call centre data has suggested arrivals are governed by an inhomogeneous Poisson process and jobs have a log-normal service time distribution. Simulation algorithms are increasingly being used to model call arrival, queueing and service levels. Call centre operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queueing, with operations research, which considers a wide range of optimisation problems seeking to reduce waiting times while keeping server utilisation and therefore efficiency high.


Criticism

Call centres have received criticism for low pay rates and restrictive working practices for employees, which have been deemed as a dehumanising environment. Other research illustrates how call centre workers develop ways to counter or resist this environment by integrating local cultural sensibilities or embracing a vision of a new life. Most call centres provide electronic reports that outline performance metrics, quarterly highlights and other information about the calls made and received. This has the benefit of helping the company to plan the workload and time of its employees. However, it has also been argued that such close monitoring breaches the human right to privacy. Complaints are often logged by callers who find the staff do not have enough skill or authority to resolve problems, as well as appearing apathetic. These concerns are due to a business process that exhibits levels of variability because the experience a customer gets and results a company achieves on a given call are dependent upon the quality of the agent. Call centres are beginning to address this by using
agent-assisted automation Agent-assisted automation is a type of call center technology that automates elements of what the call center agent 1) does with his/her desktop tools and/or 2) says to customers during the call using pre-recorded audio. It is a relatively new ca ...
to standardise the process all agents use. However, more popular alternatives are using personality and skill based approaches. The various challenges encountered by call operators are discussed by several authors.


Media portrayals

Indian call centres have been the focus of several documentary films, the 2004 film ''Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: The Other Side of Outsourcing'', the 2005 films ''John and Jane'', '' Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night'', and ''1-800-India: Importing a White-Collar Economy'', and the 2006 film '' Bombay Calling'', among others. An Indian call centre is also the subject of the 2006 film '' Outsourced'' and a key location in the 2008 film, '' Slumdog Millionaire''. The 2014 BBC
fly on the wall Fly on the wall is a style of documentary-making used in film and television production. The name derived from the idea that events are seen candidly, as a fly on a wall might see them. In the purest form of fly-on-the-wall documentary-making, t ...
documentary series ''The Call Centre'' gave an often distorted although humorous view of life in a Welsh call centre.


See also

*
Automatic call distributor An automated call distribution system, commonly known as automatic call distributor (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs direct calls based ...
*
Business process outsourcing Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity which otherwise is or could be carried out internally, i.e. in-house, and sometimes involves transferring employees and ...
*
Call management Call management is the process of designing and implementing inbound telephone call parameters, which govern the routing of these calls through a network. The process is most prominently utilized by corporations and the call centre industry and h ...
* List of call centre companies * Predictive dialling * Operator messaging *
Queue management system How does the queue management system work? Queue management is the process of managing the experiences of customers waiting in the queue to improve business.This system quantifies queuing demand for your business, such that your staff can be mad ...
* Skills based routing *
Virtual queue Virtual queue is a concept used in inbound call centers. Call centers use an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) to distribute incoming calls to specific resources (agents) in the center. ACDs hold queued calls in First In, First Out order until agen ...
* The Call Centre, a BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary at a Welsh call centre * *


References


Further reading

* Cusack M., "Online Customer Care", American Society for Quality (ASQ) Press, 2000. * Cleveland B., "Call Center Management on Fast Forward", ICMI Press, 2006. * Kennedy I., ''Call centres'', School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, 2003. * Masi D.M.B., Fischer M.J., Harris C.M., ''Numerical Analysis of Routing Rules for Call centres'', Telecommunications Review, 1998
noblis.org


Psychosocial risk factors in call centres: An evaluation of work design and well-being. * Reena Patel, ''Working the Night Shift: Women in India's Call Center Industry'' (Stanford University Press; 2010) 219 pages; traces changing views of "women's work" in India under globalization. * Fluss, Donna, "The Real-Time Contact centre", 2005 AMACOM * Wegge, J., van Dick, R., Fisher, G., Wecking, C., & Moltzen, K. (2006, January). Work motivation, organisational identification, and well-being in call centre work. Work & Stress, 20(1), 60–83. * Legros, B. (2016). Unintended consequences of optimizing a queue discipline for a service level defined by a percentile of the waiting time. ''Operations Research Letters'', ''44''(6), 839–845.


External links

* * Mandelbaum, Avisha
Call Centers (Centres) Research Bibliography with Abstracts
Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. {{DEFAULTSORT:Call Centre Computer telephony integration Telemarketing Outsourcing Telephony Customer service