Call centre

For the contact centres in family law, see children's centre.

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A 1970 police call centre in Brierley Hill, England

A call centre (Commonwealth spelling) or call center (American spelling; see spelling differences) is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product or service support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are usually operated for sales purposes such as telemarketing, for solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection, market research, emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs blood banks. A contact centre is a further extension of call centres telephony based capabilities, administers centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and email.[1]

A call center was previously seen as an open workspace for call center agents, with workstations that included a computer and display for each agent and were connected to an inbound/outbound call management system, 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, microcomputer, servers and LANs. It is expected that artificial intelligence-based chatbots will significantly impact call centre jobs and will increase productivity substantially.[2][3][4] Many organisations have already adopted AI-based chatbots to improve their customer service experience.[4][5][3]

The contact center is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information can be routed to the appropriate people or systems, contacts can be tracked, and data may be gathered. It is generally a part of the company's customer relationship management infrastructure. The majority of large companies use contact centers as a means of managing their customer interactions. 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 Centres[6]).

  1. ^ "Contact Center vs Communication Center vs Call Center". EWA Bespoke Communications. 2010-03-26.
  2. ^ Adam, M., Wessel, M. & Benlian, A. AI-based chatbots in customer service and their effects on user compliance. Electron Markets 31, 427–445 (2021). doi:10.1007/s12525-020-00414-7
  3. ^ a b Krishnan, C., Gupta, A., Gupta, A., Singh, G. (2022). Impact of Artificial Intelligence-Based Chatbots on Customer Engagement and Business Growth. In: Hong, TP., Serrano-Estrada, L., Saxena, A., Biswas, A. (eds) Deep Learning for Social Media Data Analytics. Studies in Big Data, vol 113. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-10869-3_11
  4. ^ a b "AI-enabled customer service is now the quickest and most effective route for institutions to deliver personalized, proactive experiences that drive customer engagement". New York: McKinsey & Company. March 27, 2023.
  5. ^ Brandon Turpin (August 2, 2023). "How chatbots can provide a better customer experience". IBM.
  6. ^ Jolaoso, Christiana (4 February 2024). Main, Kelly (ed.). "Call Center Outsourcing: Pros, Cons & Best Practices – Forbes Advisor". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-02-14.