A call centre or call center technology is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone.

A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact centre.

A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace, with work stations that include a computer, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom 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, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).

Most major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centres. Examples of this include help desks and sales support.

Call Centers Technology

Call Centres use a wide variety of different technologies to allow them to manage the large volumes of work that need to be managed by the call centre. These technologies ensure that agents are kept as productive as possible, and that calls are queued and processed as quickly as possible, resulting in good levels of service.

These includes:

• ACD (automatic call distribution)
• Agent performance analytics
• BTTC (best time to call)/ Outbound call optimization
• IVR (interactive voice response)
• Guided Speech IVR
• CTI (computer telephony integration)
• Enterprise Campaign Management
• Outbound predictive dialer
• CRM (customer relationship management)
• CIM (customer interaction management. Also known as Unified solutions)
• Email Management
• Chat and Web Collaboration
• Desktop Scripting Solutions
• Outsourcing
• Third Party Verification (Third party verification)
• TTS (text to speech)
• WFM (workforce management)
• Virtual queuing
• Voice analysis
• Voice recognition
• Voicemail
• Voice recording
• VoIP
• Speech Analytics

(Source: Wikipedia - The free encyclopedia.)