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. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. 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 centre agents, 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 corporate computer 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 centre is a central point of any organization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, 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 relationship management (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing, and even instant messaging.

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Technology

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.[1] Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies,[2] both for inbound and outbound campaigns, whereby inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task, whilst minimizing 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, socioeconomic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead. The concept of the Universal Queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies 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 Centre Technology Historically, call centres have been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the call centre operator. The PBX might provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The call centre operator would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor.

Virtual Call Centre Technology[3] With the advent of the Software as a service technology delivery model, the virtual call centre has emerged. In a virtual call centre model, the call centres operator does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call centre runs on. Instead, they subscribe to a service for a monthly or annual fee with a service provider that hosts the call centre telephony equipment in their own data centre. Such a vendor may host many call centres on their equipment. Agents connect to the vendor'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 centre, rather than at the call centre operator's premise. The vendor's telephony equipment then connects the calls to the call centre operator's agents.

Virtual Call Centre Technology allows people to work from home, instead of in a traditional, centralised, call centre location, which increasingly allows people with physical or other disabilities that prevent them from leaving the house, to work.[4]

Cloud Computing for Call Centres Cloud computing for call centres extends cloud computing to Software as a service, or hosted, on-demand call centres by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) on the call centre cloud computing platform that allow call centre functionality to be integrated with cloud-based Customer relationship management, such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM and leads management and other applications.

The APIs typically provide programmatic access to two key groups of features in the call centre platform:

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) APIs provide developers with access to basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling on the call centre platform from a separate application.

Configuration APIs provide programmatic control of administrative functions of the call centre platform which are typically accessed by a human administrator through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Patents

There are many 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 40 patents covering inventions related to charge-free numbers, automated attendant, automated call distribution, voice response unit, computer telephone integration and speech recognition.[5]

Dynamics

Calls may be inbound or outbound. Inbound calls are made by consumers, for example to obtain information, report a malfunction, or ask for help. In contrast, outbound calls are made by agents to consumers, usually for sales purposes (telemarketing). One can combine inbound and outbound campaigns.[6]

Call centre staff are often organised into a multi-tier support system for more efficient handling of calls. The first tier consists of operators, who initially answer calls and provide general information. If a caller requires more assistance, the call is forwarded to the second tier (in the appropriate department depending on the nature of the call). In some cases, there are three or more tiers of support staff. Typically the third tier of support is formed of product engineers/developers or highly skilled technical support staff for the product.

Some critics of call centres argue that the work atmosphere in such an environment is dehumanising.[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]. Call centres have also 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 staff sometimes appear apathetic[12].

Telephone calls are easily monitored, and the close monitoring of call centre staff is widespread.[13] This has the benefit[14] 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[15].

Varieties

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

Criticism and performance

Criticisms of call centres generally follow a number of common themes, from both callers and call centre staff. From callers, common criticisms include:[17]

Common criticisms from staff include:[19]

The net-net of these concerns is that call centres as a business process exhibit 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.[20] Call centres are beginning to address this by using Agent-assisted Automation 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]

Outsourced bureau contact centres

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.

Bureau contact centres provide an opportunity for:

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 National Union of Workers represents unionised workers; their activities form part of the Australian labour movement.[35] In Europe, Uni Global Union of Switzerland is involved in assisting unionisation in this realm.[36]

Standardisation

Customer Operations Performance Center Inc. (COPC) is the globally recognised performance management framework for the contact centre and BPO industry. You can become certified to the COPC-2000 CSP Standard after demonstrating compliance to over 30 different items of contact centre performance as outlined in the COPC-2000 CSP Standard.

The COPC-2000 CSP Standard can be downloaded for free and is "open source" meaning it can also be utilized within your contact centre as a service to the industry.

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.[37][38] The models can be applied to answer queueing questions for call centres. The most widespread queueing model used is the Erlang C Formula.

Call centre operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queueing, with operations research, which considers a wide range of optimisation problems.

Media portrayals

Indian call centres have been the focus of at least two documentary films, the 2005 film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night and the 2006 film Bombay Calling.

See also


References

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  33. ^ ed. by Pradeep Kumar ...; Pradeep Kumar, Christopher Robert Schenk (2006). Paths to Union Renewal. Broadview Press. ISBN 1-55193-058-7. 
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  38. ^ Queueing Models of Call Centers: An Introduction Ger Koole

Further reading