A contact center is a centralized office used for the purpose of sending & receiving large volumes of requests by telephone.

A contact center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientèle, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call center, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact center.
A contact center is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, 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, 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 through call centers. Examples of this include help desks and sales support. However, some companies employ staff to work in their call centers almost by "bulk", applicants requiring little or no educational qualifications or experience; an example is Lloyds TSB. In contrast, some firms demand lengthy customer service experience, various formal certificates and impose a complicated and staged recruitment interview procedure; an example of this is American Express. - Wikipedia

Mathematics

A call center can be viewed, from an operational point of view, as a queuing network. The simplest call center, consisting of a single type of customers and statistically-identical servers, can be viewed as a single-queue. Queuing theory is a branch of mathematics in which models of such queuing systems have been developed. These models, in turn, are used to support work force planning and management, for example by helping answer the following common staffing-question: given a service-level, as determined by management, what is the least number of telephone agents that is required to achieve it. (Prevalent examples of service levels are: at least 80% of the callers are answered within 20 seconds; or, no more than 3% of the customers’ hang-up, due to their impatience, before being served.)

Queuing models also provide qualitative insight, for example identifying the circumstances under which economies of scale prevail, namely that a single large call centre is more effective at answering calls than several (distributed) smaller ones; or that cross-selling is beneficial; or that a call center should be quality-driven or efficiency-driven or, most likely, both Quality and Efficiency Driven (abbreviated to QED). Recently, queuing models have also been used for planning and operating skills-based-routing of calls within a call center, which entails the analysis of systems with multi-type customers and multi-skilled agents.

Contact Center operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queuing, with operations research, which considers a wide range of optimization problems, being very relevant. For example, for forecasting of calls, for determining shift-structures, and even for analyzing customers' impatience while waiting to be served by an agent.

Contact Center Technology

• IVR
• CTI
• ACD
• Customer Satisfaction Research

Contact Center Criticisms

Common contact center criticisms

From Callers:

• Operators working from a script.
• Non-expert operators (call screening).
• Incompetent or untrained operators incapable of processing customers' requests effectively.
• Overseas location, with language and accent problems.
• Automated queuing systems. This sometimes results in excessively long hold times
• Complaints that departments of companies do not engage in communication with one another.

From Staff:

• Close scrutiny by management (e.g. frequent random call monitoring).
• Low compensation (pay and bonuses).
• Restrictive working practices (some operators are required to follow a pre-written script).
• High stress: a common problem associated with front-end jobs where employees deal directly with customers.
• Repetitive job task.
• Poor working conditions (e.g. poor facilities, poor maintenance and cleaning, cramped working conditions, management interference, lack of privacy and noisy).

Contact Centers & VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol has drastically altered the way contact centers work, particularly considering the influence VoIP had with the creation of Virtual Call Centers. A virtual call center is created by taking many small call centers (often at-home workers) from different locations and connecting them to one another. This is usually done through the use of VoIP, IVR, ACD, and CTI. The advantage of virtual call centers is that they improve service levels, provide emergency backup and enable extended operating hours over isolated call centers. There are two methods used to route traffic around call centers: pre-delivery and post-delivery. Pre-delivery involves using an external switch to route the calls to the appropriate centre and post-delivery enables call centers to route a call they've received to another call center.

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See Also

Commercial Providers

3CLogic

• 3CLogic offers a full suite of cloud based inbound and outbound customer interaction channels such as voice, chat and social media which integrate with our clients' existing CRM software such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics. This integration provides businesses with a 360 degree view of all customer interactions regardless of the channel chosen by their customers.
• 3CLogic's unique Virtual Telephony Application Grid (V-TAG) leverages VoIP and Web 2.0 technology to eliminate the complexity of integrating Contact Centers with CRM software. All capabilities can be made fully operational in a matter of hours while moves, adds and changes take only minutes using 3CLogic's wed-based management console.
• With 3CLogic's cloud based Contact Center, companies have more accurate and timely information about their prospect or customer and they can more efficiently respond to communications, ensure customer satisfaction with better service, and drive toward a larger lifetime value of each account, customer or client. Call 1-800-350-8656 for a free consultation.

800PBX(Now PBX Plus)

• PBX Plus offers virtual pbx and hosted pbx services in 40 different countries. Features include voice driven auto attendant, call forwarding, voicemail (with transcription), audio conferencing, extensions, subextensions. Coverage includes 40 countries.
• Free PBX - Fully loaded FREE PBX for growing businesses.
• Skype PBX - PBX Plus can now forward calls to not only landlines and mobiles in 40 different countries but also to Skype accounts.
• Skype Call Center - PBX+ extends Skype as PBX offering to call centers.
• Invox - Drag and drop designer, Invox, provides an enhanced IVR Solutions with Virtual PBX features. The designer won Best of Show during IT Expo. Out of box applications include payment over phone, surveys (type your questions and choose answer type), store locator, geographical routing, IM integration, CRM capture lead (Salesforce, Sugar, Zoho), CRM by Phone (with speech recognition), phone appointment scheduling and reminders, outbound automation, Skype/VoIP forwarding, disaster messaging, database integration and others.

UCN

A leader in the contact center provider industry is UCN. The company has set itself apart from traditional vendors by offering hosted services, meaning consumers can experience all the benefits of advanced contact centers, but since all services are hosted within UCN, there are no heavy start-up costs. All UCN services revolve around their inContact product, which has consistently won awards year after for innovation to the call center technology and customer management fields.

Noteworthy UCN Products

• Call Center Surveys by Echo -Groundbreaking product giving businesses real time access into their customers thought process
• Virtual Call Center -Award winning InContact product to give contact centers a competitive edge.
• Hosted ACD Software -Automatic Call Distribution software to connect callers to agents automatically.
• Computer Telephony Integration -Computer Telephony Integration Software to integrate caller information with agents, regardless of location.
• IVR Systems -Interactive Voice Response Systems to manage call flow and determine the correct agent for each callers problem.
• Workforce Management Software Comprehensive Workforce Management Software to manage your contact center agents.
• Hosted Call Center solutions -Comprehensive solutions for all aspects of Call Centers across the United States.
• Customer Service Surveys -Real-time customer service surveys, delivered immediately following agent to customer contact. Allows businesses to learn what their clients really think about their products and services.

Database Systems Corp.

Database Systems Corp. has been a leading provider of call center technology since 1978. DSC provides both contact center phone systems and software as well as outsourcing phone services. DSC voice broadcasting and IVR systems are award winning computer telephony solutions. The following are some of these contact center solutions and services:

• Contact Center Software - Phone application software for small to large enterprises.
• Voice Broadcasting - Systems and outsourcing services that contact large groups of individuals using message broadcasting autodialers.
• IVR - Interactive voice response phone systems and outsourcing services.
• Telephone Reassurance - Community calling program for seniors and home alone children
• Emergency Notification Systems - Community alert systems and emergency voice broadcasting services
• IVR Applications - Listing of a variety of IVR phone applications and clients
• Phone Surveys - IVR phone survey applications and development tools
• Phone Reminders - Voice blast phone reminders
• Campus Alert Services - Contact students, faculty and parents in the event of a school emergency using emergency school notification phone systems.

Loway

Based in Switzerland, Loway is a very established international provider within the call centre arena, having created its flagship product: QueueMetrics, which is an industry-standard comprehensive monitoring and reporting software suite for call centres, based on the Asterisk PBX, that is also available directly as an Elastix add-on.

Deployed in thousands of call centres worldwide, it is a robust and reliable tool that can monitor inbound queues and outbound campaigns. The suite can support over 500 live agents, allowing operations managers, call team leaders and call agents to complete their daily tasks through a real-time interface. Activity reports can then be viewed, recorded calls can be monitored, agent activity can be measured and business targets assessed through this platform. At the same time, team leaders can view current agent status and listen to live calls. The QueueMetrics platform allows agents to see calls they are handling, integrate with external Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and much more. With a web-based interface and no client installation required, it offers various storage and deployment models.

With over 150 quantitative metrics available, any call centre will run smoothly and problems are easily identified and resolved. Minimal Asterisk interactions leads to maximum overall availability.

• QueueMetrics web site
• Loway web site

xCally

xCally is a professional Call Center suite optimized for Asterisk. It provides Inbound, Outbound and Blended features for customer care management, along with advanced reporting, web configuration and multi-channel services.

• xCally - Official Web Site
• Social Customer Care features
• Multichannel Web calls
• xCally Web Reports - Offline and Realtime web Charts (also optimized for mobile view)

See also

• Call Center
• Call Center vs Contact Center
• Call Center Software
• Call Center Solutions
• Call Center Statistics
• Call Center Monitoring
• Call Center Analytics