A  call center is a centralized office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone.

An inbound call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information enquiries from consumers.

Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research.

A contact center is a location for centralized handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.

A call center has an open workspace for call center 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 centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.

The contact center is a central point 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 relationship management. The majority of large companies use contact centers as a means of managing their customer interaction. 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 Centers).

Call center 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. 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 and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead.

The universal queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email. The virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.

Premises-based technology

Historically, call centers have been built on Private Branch Exchange (PBX) equipment that is owned, hosted, and maintained by the call centre operator themselves. The PBX can provide functions such as automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, and skills-based routing.

Virtual call center

In the virtual call center model, the call center operator pays a monthly or annual fee to a vendor that hosts the call center telephony equipment in their own data center. In this model, the operator does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call center runs on. Agents connect to the vendor’s equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, or over Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP).  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 premises. The vendor’s telephony equipment then connects the calls to the call center operator’s agents.

Virtual call center technology allows people to work from home, instead of in a traditional, centralized, call center location, which increasingly allows people with physical or other disabilities that prevent them from leaving the house, to work. The only required equipment is internet access and a workstation.  The companies are preferring Virtual Call Center services due to cost advantage. Companies can start their call center business immediately without installing the basic infrastructure like Dialer, ACD and IVRS.

Cloud computing

Through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), hosted and on-demand call centers that are built on cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms can integrate their functionality with cloud-based applications for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), lead management and more.

Developers use APIs to enhance cloud-based call center platform functionality—including Computer Telephony Integration (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.

Contact centers run support or help desks, which regularly answers technical questions from customers and assists them using their equipment or software. Support desks are used by companies in the computing, telecommunications and consumer electronics industries.

Customer service contact centers answer specific queries relating to customer issues, in the banking and utility sectors these are frequently used to answer customer questions relating to their account or payments, this type of service may even be used to respond to customer complaints and undertake retention strategies for unsatisfied customers.

Contact centers also carry out sales and marketing activities; these can be performed through cold calling strategies and increasingly through live chat applications on company websites.

We have over 25 years of partnerships with all major US and International Telecommunications companies and Data Centers.