call center or call center is a central office used to receive or send multiple requests by phone. Incoming call centers are operated by the company to manage incoming product support or customer inquiries. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, charity or political donations, debt collection and market research. The contacts center is the location for handling centralized individualized communications, including mail, fax, direct support software, social media, instant messaging, and email.
Call centers have open spaces for call center agents, with work stations that include computers for each agency, a set of phones/headsets connected to telecom switches, and one or more monitoring stations. These can be operated independently or networked with additional centers, often connected to corporate computer networks, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, voice and data paths to the center are connected through a set of new technologies called computer phone integration.
Contact centers are the focal point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information about the company is directed to the right person, contacts to track and data to be collected. This is generally part of the company's customer relationship management. The majority of large companies use contact centers as a means of managing their customer interactions. These centers may be operated by responsible domestic departments or transfer customer interactions to third-party agents (known as Outsourcing Call Centers).
Video Call centre
History
The origins of call centers date back to the 1960s with UK-based Birmingham Press and Mail, which was installed Private Private Business Exchange (PABX) to have an agent line handle customer contacts. In 1973, the call center received major attention after Rockwell International patented the Automatic Galaxy Call Distributor (GACD) for the phone booking system and popularized the phone headset as seen at the NASA Mission Control Center show aired on television.
During the late 1970s, call center technology expanded to include telephone sales, flight bookings, and the banking system. The term "call center" was first published and recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1983. The 1980s experienced the development of a toll-free number to improve agent efficiency and overall call volume. Call centers are increasing with long distance call deregulation and industry dependent growth of information.
As the call center expanded, unity took place in North America to gain members including the American Communications Workers and the United Steelworkers. In Australia, the National Workers Union represents union workers; their activities are part of the Australian labor movement. In Europe, the Union Global Union of Switzerland is engaged in helping unity in this world and in Germany Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft represents call center workers.
During the 1990s, call centers expanded internationally and evolved into two additional subsets of communications, contact centers and outsourced bureaus. A contact center is defined as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies and strategies that provide access to information, resources, and expertise, through proper communication channels, enabling interactions that create value for customers and organizations. In contrast to internal management, outsourcing contact center outlets are a contact center model that provides services on the "pay per usage" model. Contact center overhead costs are shared by many clients, thus supporting a very cost effective model, especially for low call volume. Modern contact centers have developed more complex systems, requiring highly skilled operational and management staff who can use online and offline multichannel tools to improve customer interaction.
Maps Call centre
Technology
Call center technology includes voice recognition software to enable computers to handle the first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to enable better customer handling, agent training with automated mining best practices of past interaction, support automation, and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Selection of automatic leads or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiency, both for inbound and outbound campaign. This allows incoming calls to be routed directly to the appropriate agent for the task, while minimizing waiting times and long lists of irrelevant options for the caller. For outgoing calls, selection of prospects allows management to determine which types of leads lead to which agents on factors including skills, socioeconomic factors and past performance and the likelihood of closing percentage of sales per lead.
Businesses often have a series of standalone systems to manage customer related activities and transactional customer data from marketing, sales, customer service, and other business applications. This makes it difficult for a company to develop a single customer view.
The universal queue standardizes the processing of communications across technologies such as fax, phone and email. A virtual queue provides an alternate caller to wait while there is no agent available to handle incoming call requests.
Place-based technology
Historically, call centers have been built on Private Branch Exchange (PBX) equipment owned, hosted, and managed by the call center operators themselves. PBX can provide functions such as automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, and skill-based routing.
Virtual call centers
In a virtual call center model, call center operators pay monthly or annual fees to vendors who host call center telephony equipment in their own data centers. In this model, the operator does not own, operate or host the equipment where the call center is running. Agents connected to vendor equipment through traditional PSTN phone lines, or via voice over IP. Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or end up in vendor data centers, not where call center operators are. The vendor's phone equipment then connects the call to the call center operator agent.
Virtual call center technology enables people to work from home, not in a traditional, centralized call center location, which increasingly allows people with physical disabilities or other defects that prevent them from leaving home, to work. The only equipment needed is Internet access and workstations. Companies prefer Virtual Call Center services because of their cost advantages. Companies can start their call center business immediately without installing basic infrastructure like Dialer, ACD and IVRS.
Cloud computing
Through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), host and on-demand call centers built on cloud-based software as a service platform (SaaS) 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 that provide basic phone control and advanced call handling from separate applications, and configuration APIs that allow graphical user interface control (GUI) functionality.
Outsourcing
Dialed call centers are often in developing countries, where wages are much lower. The call center industry in the Philippines and the call center industry in Bangladesh serves as a good example.
Companies that regularly use customized contact center services include British Sky Broadcasting and Orange in the telecommunications industry, Adidas in sport and leisure sectors, Audi in car manufacturing and charities such as the RSPCA.
Industry
Health Care
The health care industry has been using outgoing call center programs for years to help manage billing, collection, and patient communications. The incoming call center is a new and increasingly popular service for various types of health care facilities, including major hospitals. Incoming call centers can be self-managed or self-managed.
The health care center is designed to help streamline communications, improve patient retention and satisfaction, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency.
Hospitality
Many major hotel companies such as Hilton Hotels Corporation and Marriott International make use of call centers to manage reservations. This is known in the industry as a "central reservation office". The staff member at this call center receives a call from a client wishing to make a reservation or another question through a public number, usually 1-800. These centers can operate 24 hours per day, seven days a week, depending on the volume of calls the chain receives.
Evaluation
Math theory
Queue theory is the branch of mathematics in which the service system model has been developed. Call centers can be viewed as queuing networks and the results of the queuing theory such as the possibility of incoming customers having to wait before starting a useful service for supply capacity. (Erlang C formula is such a result for queue M/M/c and approximations exist for queue M/G/k.) Statistical analysis of call center data has suggested arrival is regulated by non-homogeneous Poisson processes and the work has a time distribution of service normal. Simulation algorithms are increasingly being used to model call arrivals, queues and service levels.
Call center operations have been supported by mathematical models outside the queue, with operations research, which considers a variety of optimization issues that seek to reduce waiting times while maintaining server utilization and therefore high efficiency.
Criticism
Call Centers have received criticism for low wage rates and limiting employment practices for employees, who have been perceived as inhumane environments. Another study illustrates how call center workers develop ways to counter or deny this environment by integrating local cultural sensitivities or embracing a new vision of life. Most call centers provide electronic reports that describe performance metrics, quarter highlights, and other information about made and received calls. It has the benefit of helping the company to plan the workload and time of its employees. However, it has also been argued that such rigorous monitoring violates the human rights of privacy.
Complaints are often noted by callers who find that staff do not have sufficient skills or authority to solve problems, and appear apathetic. This concern is caused by a business process that shows the degree of variability due to the experience the customer gains and the company's results on a given call depends on the quality of the agent. Call centers begin to handle this by using agency-assisted automation to standardize the processes used by all agents. However, a more popular alternative uses a personality-based approach and skills. The challenges faced by call operators are discussed by several authors.
Media depictions
The call centers of India have been the focus of several documentaries, the 2004 film Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: The Other Side of Outsourcing , the 2005 film John and Jane , Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night , and 1-800-India: Importing White-Collar Economy , and Movie 2006 Bombay Calling , among others. The Indian call center is also the subject of the 2006 film Outsourced (film) and the main location in the 2008 movie Slumdog Millionaire . The BBC's 2014 fly in the wall documenter series The Call Center provides a distorted, albeit funny look at the Welsh call center.
See also
- Automatic call distribution
- Outsourcing business process
- Call management
- List of call center companies
- Predictive calls
- Operator message
- Queuing management system
- Skill-based route
- Virtual queue
- The Call Center, a BBC documentary in the Welsh call center
References
Further reading
- Cusack M., "Online Customer Service", American Society for Quality (ASQ) Press, 2000.
- Cleveland B., "Call Center Management in Fast Forward", ICMI Press, 2006.
- Kennedy I., Call center , School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Witwatersrand, 2003.
- Masi D.M.B., Fischer M.J., Harris C.M., Numerical Analysis of Routing Regulations for Call Center , Telecommunications Telecommunications, 1998, noblis.org
- HSE website Psychosocial risk factors at call center: Design evaluation and work-welfare.
- Reena Patel, Working Night Shift: Women in Indian Call Center Industry (Stanford University Press; 2010) 219 pages; tracing the change of view of "women's work" in India under globalization.
- Fluss, Donna, "Real-Time Contact Center", 2005 AMACOM
- Wegge, J., van Dick, R., Fisher, G., Wecking, C., & amp; Moltzen, K. (2006, January). Work motivation, organizational identification, and welfare in call center work. Working & amp; Stress, 20 (1), 60-83.
- Website of the Customer Performance Operations Center for more information on COPC-2000 CSP Standards.
- Legros, B. (2016). The unintended consequence of optimizing the queue discipline for service levels is determined by the percentile of waiting time. Operational Research Letter , 44 (6), 839-845.
External links
- Media related to the call center on Wikimedia Commons
- Mandelbaum, Avishai Call Center (Center) Bibliographic Research with Abstract. Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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