The Call Center industry provides a large percent
of employment in the United States. There are many classifications of Call Centers and these mainly depend on the
kind of service they provide. A call center is a centralized office that answers incoming telephone calls from
customers for the purposes of product support and complaint. These call centers also make outgoing telephone calls
to customers that is more commonly known as telemarketing. An office may also respond to letters, faxes, e-mails
and similar written correspondence.
The typical call center is usually set-up in a large room or an entire floor of a building, with workstations that
include a computer, a telephone set hooked into a large telecom switch and one or more supervisor stations. The
call center may be linked to a network of other call centers or a corporation's computer networks, including main
frames, microcomputers and LANs. The growing voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a new
technology called computer telephony integration (CTI)
Businesses invest in a call center to interact with their customers. These include utility
companies, mail order catalogue firms and customer care and support for hardware and software. The use of call
centers is not limited to this since they can also be used for internal functions of the business like sales
support and help desks.
In the UK, call centers have been built in economically depressed areas because of the cheap land and labor. The
community benefits from the employment grants and the standard of living they have dramatically uplifted. In recent
years, India and the Philippines have been a good alternative in outsourcing call centers. There are an abundant
number of college graduates in these countries who can speak English and serve customers in North America. This has
led to many media reports of poor telephone connections and operators with insufficient local knowledge to aide in
the customer's complaint. Next Article: Contact
Management