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Call Centers

   A call center (Commonwealth English) or call center (AmE) is a centralized office of a company that answers incoming telephone calls from customers or that makes outgoing telephone calls to customers (telemarketing). Such an office may also responds to letters, faxes, e-mails and similar written correspondence. However the term contact center (Commonwealth English) or contact center (AmE) is often applied when such multiple functions are blended in one office.

   Call centers are generally set up as large rooms, with work stations that include a computer, a telephone set (or headset) hooked into a large telecom switch and one or more supervisor stations. It may stand by itself or be linked with other centers. It may also be linked to a corporate data network, including main frames, 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 call centers 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 though call centers. Examples include help desks and sales support.

Mathematical theory

   Queuing theory mathematics can be used to demonstrate that a single large call center is more effective at answering calls than several smaller centers. The most dramatic improvements come when a large number of offices are centralized.

   The mathematical problems encountered in a call center are generally statistical in nature and revolve around the probability that an arriving call will be answered by an available and appropriately trained person. Forecasting the call arrival rates and then scheduling the number of staff required on duty at particular times of the day are challenging problems faced by most call center managers.


Accommodation

    The centralized approach aims to rationalize the company's operations and reduce costs, whilst producing a standard, branded, front to the world. The approach naturally lends itself to large companies with a large, distributed customer base. Owing to the size of companies and their customer bases, these offices are often very large, such as converted warehouses.


Personnel Management
   Centralized offices means that large numbers of workers can be managed and controlled by a relatively small number of managers and support staff. They are often supported by computer technology that manages, measures and monitors the performance and activities of the workers. Call center staff are some of the most heavily monitored and tracked groups of workers in the world.

   Reporting and monitoring in a call center can be broken down into four major categories. These are real time reporting, historical reporting, quality monitoring and work force management. The types of information collected for a group of call center agents are inclusive of: agents logged in, agents ready to take calls, agents available to take calls, agents in wrap up mode, average call duration, average call duration including wrap-up time, longest duration agent available, longest duration call in queue, number of calls in queue, number of calls offered, number of calls abandoned, average speed to answer, average speed to abandoned and service level (the percentage of calls answered in under a certain time period).

   Many call centers use work force management software, which is software that uses historical information coupled with projected need to generate automated schedules that will provide the correct mixture of staff with the correct skills necessary to service customers.

   Normally, personnel costs are the most significant expense of a call center operation and even seemingly small inefficiencies can have significant cost issues. This is one of the major driving factors of outsourcing in the call center industry.

   Inadequate computer systems can mean staff take one or two seconds longer than necessary to process a transaction. This can often be quantified in staff cost terms. This is often used as a driving factor in any business case to justify a complete system upgrade or replacement. For several factors, including the efficiency of the call center, level of computer and telecom support that may be adequate for staff in a typical branch office may prove totally inadequate in a call center.


Technology
   Call centers have been aided by a range of telecommunications and computer technologies, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), which allows the actions of the computer to be synchronized with what is happening on the phone. In addition, early customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, such as Siebel, Clarify, Vantive and PeopleSoft, and other database systems, have been heavily employed in call centers. The latest internet technologies allow "virtual" call centers to be established across a company's telecommunications network without physically putting all the people in one office. These often employ VoIP technology.


Call Center Dynamics

   Types of calls are often divided into outbound and inbound. Inbound calls are calls that are initiated by the customer to obtain information, report a malfunction or ask for help. This is substantially different from outbound calls where the agent initiates the call to a customer mostly with the aim to sell a product or a service to that customer.

   The staff of the call center that is focused on support of a product is often organized into a mult-tier support model, with the first tier being largely unskilled workers who are trained to resolve issues using a simple script. If the first tier is unable to resolve an issue the issue is escalated to a more highly skilled second tier. In some cases, there may be third or higher tiers of support. Typically the third tier of support are the engineers or developers of the product.

   Call centers have their critics as well. Some critics argue that the work atmosphere in such an environment is de-humanizing. Others point to the low rates of pay and restrictive working practices of some employers. There has been much controversy over such things as restricting the amount of time that an employee can spend in the toilet. Furthermore, call centers have been the subject of complaints by callers who find the staff of the call centers often do not have enough skill or authority to resolve problems.

   Owing to the highly technological nature of the operations in such offices, the close monitoring of staff activities is easy and widespread. This can be argued to be beneficial, to enable the company to better plan the workload and time of its employees. Some people have argued that such close monitoring breaches human rights to privacy. Yet another argument is that close monitoring and measurement by quantitative metrics can be counterproductive in that it can lead to poor customer service and a poor image of the company.

    There has also been a trend to move call centers to India, where there is a large pool of cheap English-speaking labor. This phenomenon has led to media reports of poor telephone connections and operators with insufficient local knowledge to do their job. But the fact remains that these call centers in India are much professionally managed than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. This is possible due to the fact, that whereas a typical call center employee in the developed world would be a high school drop out, the typical employee in an Indian call center is a graduate.