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A Call Centre is a department within a company, or a third-party organisation, which manages telephone sales and/or services. The term "Contact Centre" may also be used, and this relates to the primary purpose of the centre i.e. receiving incoming calls from customers that desire to make contact with the organisation. The name "Contact Centre" may also reflect the multiple channels through which customers can communicate and make contact with the centre e.g. email, fax, telephone, web sites.
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The Stage
Call Centres range from simple telephone answering services through to complex organisations using sophisticated technologies and requiring highly skilled adaptable staff. Services may be provided by linking multiple sites together to cover peak periods in demand by seamlessly overflowing calls between sites. Calls may also be routed to different sites offering specialised services, languages, or time zones. The Call Centre may be operated under its parent company management structure, or services may be out-sourced using a Call Centre specialist company.
Customer Services Representatives (CSRs), the key resource within a call centre, are front line employees that have direct knowledge of customers and often play a mission critical role in shaping customer perceptions of organisations. The role of the CSR is increasingly requiring a wide skill set e.g. oral, written, product knowledge, sales, pricing, and technology skills along with an ability to handle stressful situations when dealing with customers.
Call Centres are increasingly being accessed via the Internet and e-commerce is being used to simplify transactions and to provide 24/7 availability. Call Centres use automatic call distributors (ACDs) to route calls to the appropriate CSR. ACDs are computerised phone systems that respond to callers using voice menus and distribute calls evenly between agents. Blended Call Centres allow agents to both make, and receive, calls as demand or strategy dictates. Blended Call Centres often combine ACDs (for incoming calls) with predictive dialling (for outbound calls) thus enabling more efficient use of the agents. The systems may also be linked to computer databases, adding a further level of service by making connections based on a caller's previous history. Skills-based routing can be invoked to connect a caller, along with the appropriate database files, to the CSR having the appropriate skills required e.g. a foreign language. Some ACDs can also route e-mail, faxes, web-initiated calls and customer call-back requests.
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