A call center or contact center is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A contact center 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 center, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact center.
A contact center is often operated through an extensive 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 (CTI).
Most major businesses use contact center 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 contact center. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.
A contact center, also known as customer interaction center is a central point of any organization 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 customer relationship management (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing and even instant messaging and vice versa.