A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letter, fax, live chat, and email at one location is known as a contact centre.
A call centre is 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 atelecom 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, micro computers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called Computer Telephony Integration (CTI).
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 telephone, e-mail, online chat, fax, and instant message.
