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n call centre]]

A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone
Telephone

The telephone is a telecommunications device that is used to transmitter and receive electronically or digitally encoded sound between two or more people conversing....
. A call centre is operated by a company
Company

Generally, a company is a form of business organization. The precise definition varies.In the United States, a company is a corporation—or, less commonly, an association, partnership, or union—that carries on an industrial enterprise." Generally, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, Inv...
 to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing
Telemarketing

Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits to prospective customers to buy product or Service , either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call....
, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, fax
Fax

Fax is a telecommunications technology used to transfer copies of documents, especially using affordable devices operating over the telephone network....
es, 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 centre agents
Customer representative

A customer representative is an individual who represents a community that intends to purchase a product. The term is most often applied to a representative of a company who works closely with a producer or developer to clarify specifications for a product or service....
, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone
Telephone

The telephone is a telecommunications device that is used to transmitter and receive electronically or digitally encoded sound between two or more people conversing....
 set/headset
Headphones

Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, with a way of holding them close to a user's ears and a means of connecting them to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio or CD player....
 connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations.






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n call centre]]

A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone
Telephone

The telephone is a telecommunications device that is used to transmitter and receive electronically or digitally encoded sound between two or more people conversing....
. A call centre is operated by a company
Company

Generally, a company is a form of business organization. The precise definition varies.In the United States, a company is a corporation—or, less commonly, an association, partnership, or union—that carries on an industrial enterprise." Generally, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, Inv...
 to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing
Telemarketing

Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits to prospective customers to buy product or Service , either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call....
, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, fax
Fax

Fax is a telecommunications technology used to transfer copies of documents, especially using affordable devices operating over the telephone network....
es, 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 centre agents
Customer representative

A customer representative is an individual who represents a community that intends to purchase a product. The term is most often applied to a representative of a company who works closely with a producer or developer to clarify specifications for a product or service....
, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone
Telephone

The telephone is a telecommunications device that is used to transmitter and receive electronically or digitally encoded sound between two or more people conversing....
 set/headset
Headphones

Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, with a way of holding them close to a user's ears and a means of connecting them to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio or CD player....
 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 corporate computer network
Computer network

A computer network is a group of interconnected computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics. This article provides a general overview of some types and categories and also presents the basic components of a network....
, including mainframes
Mainframe computer

Mainframes are computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, Enterprise Resource Planning, and financial transaction processing....
, microcomputer
Microcomputer

A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. Another general characteristic of these computers is that they occupy physically small amounts of space when compared to mainframe computer and minicomputers....
s and LANs
Local area network

A local area network is a computer network covering a small physical area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings, such as a school, or an airport....
. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration
Computer telephony integration

Computer telephony integration, also called computer-telephone integration or CTI, is technology that allows interactions on a telephone and a computer to be integrated or co-ordinated....
 (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.

Call centre technology

Callcentre
Call centre technology is subject to improvements and innovations. Some of these technologies include speech recognition
Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to machine-readable input . The term "voice recognition" is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to speech recognition, when actually referring to speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person speaking, as opposed to what is being said....
 and speech synthesis
Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human Speech communication. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware....
 software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining
Text mining

Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers generally to the process of deriving high-quality information from text....
 and natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
 to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, a business technical term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation....
. Automatic lead selection or lead stearing is also intended to improve efficiencies, 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, as well as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socio-economic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead. The concept of the Universal Queue
Universal Queue

Universal Queue or UQ is a relatively advanced concept in contact center design whereby multiple communications channels are integrated into a single 'universal queue' to standardize processing and handling....
 standardises the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email.

Patents

Telemarketoffice
There are a large number of patent
Patent

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a term of patent in exchange for a disclosure of an invention....
s covering various aspects of call centre operation, automation, and technology. One of the early inventors in this field, Ronald A. Katz
Ronald A. Katz

Ronald A. Katz is an inventor and president of Ronald A. Katz Technology Licensing LP. His inventions are primarily in the field of automated call center technology....
, 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..

Call centre 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. (See telemarketing
Telemarketing

Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits to prospective customers to buy product or Service , either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call....
). It is possible to combine inbound and outbound campaigns.

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 inquiries to 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. Others point to the low rates of pay and restrictive working practices of some employers. There has been much controversy over such things as restricting the amount of time that an employee can spend in the toilet. 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, while the dehumanised workers very often exhibit an attitude of apathy to even the most abusive customer.

Owing to the highly technological nature of the operations in such offices, the close monitoring of staff activities is easy and widespread. This can be argued to be beneficial, 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.

Varieties of call centres

Some variations 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
    Telephony

    In telecommunication, telephony encompasses the general use of equipment to provide voice communication over distances, specifically by connecting telephones to each other....
    , e-mail
    E-mail

    Electronic mail, often abbreviated as e-mail, email, E-Mail, or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications systems....
     and internet chat
    Chat

    Chat may refer to:...
    .
  • Inbound call centre - Exclusively or predominately 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 the other.


Criticism and performance of call centres

Criticisms of call centres generally follow a number of common themes, from both callers and call centre staff. From callers, common criticisms include:
  • Operators working from a script
  • Non-expert operators (call screening)
  • Incompetent or untrained operators incapable of processing customers' requests effectively
  • Overseas location, with language and accent problems
  • Automated queuing systems—this sometimes results in excessively long hold times
  • Complaints that departments of companies do not engage in communication with one another
  • Deceit over location of call centre (such as allocating overseas workers false English names)
  • Requiring the caller to repeat the same information multiple times


Common criticisms from staff include:
  • Close scrutiny by management (e.g. frequent random call monitoring)
  • Low compensation (pay and bonuses)
  • Restrictive working practices (some operators are required to follow a pre-written script)
  • High stress: a common problem associated with front-end jobs where employees deal 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
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 a company achieves on a given call are almost totally dependent on the quality of the agent answering that call. Call centres are beginning to address this by using agent-assisted voice solutions to standardise the process all agents use. Anton and Phelps have provided a detailed HOWTO to conduct the performance evaluation of the business, whereas others are using various scientific technologies to do the jobs. However more popular alternatives are using personality and skill based approaches. The various challenges encountered by call operators are discussed by several authors.

Unionisation of call centres

Unions in North America
North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
 have made some effort to gain members from this sector, including the Communications Workers of America
Communications Workers of America

Communications Workers of America is the largest communications and media trade union in the United States , representing over 700,000 workers in both the private and public sectors....
. In Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
, the Call Centre Workers Union represents unionised workers; their activities form part of the Australian labor movement. In Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
, Uni Global Union of Switzerland
Switzerland

Switzerland is a landlocked Swiss Alps country of roughly 7.7 million people in Western Europe with an area of 41,285 km?. Switzerland is a federal republic consisting of 26 states called Cantons of Switzerland....
 is involved in assisting unionisation in this realm.

Standardisation

Currently, there are no universally bracketable international standards, other than ISO 9000
ISO 9000

ISO 9000 is a family of standardization for quality management systems. ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and is administered by accreditation and certification bodies....
 series, available for the industry to follow up. However, there are some guidelines and standing operating procedure
Standing operating procedure

The terms standard operating procedure and standing operating procedure, both abbreviated as SOP, are used in a variety of different contexts: healthcare, education, industry, military, etc....
s available on the internet.

Mathematical theory

Queuing theory
Queueing theory

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines . The theory enables mathematical analysis of several related processes, including arriving at the queue, waiting in the queue , and being served by the server at the front of the queue....
 is a branch of mathematics in which models of queuing
Queueing model

In queueing theory, a queueing model is used to approximate a real queueing situation or system, so the queueing behaviour can be analysed mathematically....
 systems have been developed. A call centre can be seen as a queuing network. The models can be applied to answer queueing questions for call centres.

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

Operations Research in the USA, South Africa and Australia, and Operational Research in Europe and Canada, is an interdisciplinary branch of applied mathematics and formal science that uses methods such as mathematical modeling, statistics, and algorithms to arrive at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex problems....
, which considers a wide range of optimisation problems
Optimization (mathematics)

In mathematics, the simplest case of optimization, or mathematical programming, refers to the study of problems in which one seeks to maxima and minima or maxima and minima a Function of a real variable by systematically choosing the values of Real number or integer variables from within an allowed set....
.

See also

  • Business process outsourcing in India
    Business process outsourcing in India

    File:An Indian call center.jpgThe business process outsourcing industry in India refers to the Services Outsourcing Industry in India, catering mainly to Western operations of Multinational corporations ....
  • List of call centre companies
    List of call centre companies

    The following is a list of WP:CORP call centre companies:* Accenture* Convergys* Home Shopping Network* NCO Group* NuComm International* StarTek, Inc....
  • Automatic call distributor
    Automatic call distributor

    In telephony, an Automatic Call Distributor , also known as Automated Call Distribution, is a information appliance or system that distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals that agents use....
  • Call centre industry in the Philippines
    Call center industry in the Philippines

    In 2004, the Philippines already captured 20 % of the total world market share in contact center services. The Philippine government estimates the Philippines could capture 50 % of the total world English-speaking market in 2008....
  • Erlang distribution
    Erlang distribution

    The Erlang distribution is a continuous probability distribution with wide applicability primarily due to its relation to the exponential distribution and Gamma distribution distributions....
  • Skills based routing
    Skills based routing

    Skills based routing , or Skills-based call routing, is a call assignment strategy used in call centres to assign incoming calls to the most suitable agent, rather than simply choosing the next available agent....
  • Queue management system
  • Virtual queue
    Virtual queue

    Virtual queuing is a concept that is used in inbound call centers. Call centers utilize an Automatic Call Distributor to distribute incoming calls to specific resources in the center....


Further reading

  • 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. http://www.noblis.org/Publications/TR98_8.doc
  • HSE Web site at for guidelines about call centre working * practices.
  • 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.