The Basic Knowledge About Call Centers

Call centers are centralized offices used for the
purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume
of requests by telephone. They can provide services
that can increase the productivity of several
businesses. But for small businesses, call centers can
provide the advantage of increasing their bottom
lines.

Business services call centers provide normally
include order collection, customer care,
telemessaging, customer service options and a lot
more. These services are also offered with
multi-lingual options. May it be French, Spanish,
Chinese or English, several capable representatives
can easily handle clientele from all across the globe,
thus increasing the businesses.

Usually, call centers are operated by companies aimed
in administering incoming product support or
information from consumers. There are open workspaces
for agents, which include computers, telephone set or
headset connected to a telecom switch and one or more
stations for supervisors.

Technologies Used By Call Centers

In order to improve the company’s operations and
reduce the costs, while providing standardized,
uniform and streamlined services to customers, the
centralization of call management is used. Apart from
that, call centers utilize a wide variety of different
technologies allowing them to manage large volumes of
work. Such technologies facilitate processing and
queuing of calls, maintaining consistency of the work
flow for agents and creating cost savings for other
businesses.

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is one of the
technologies call centers use. This kind of technology
is a protocol optimized for the transmission of voice
through the Internet or other packet switched network.
Outsourcing is another technology used by call
centers, which is actually the subcontracting of a
process including the manufacturing or designing of
products to a third-party company.

There are others who theorized that with the
advancement of the society, future call centers would
include technologies, like speech recognition and
speech synthesis. These kinds of software are now in
development and allow computers to handle first level
of customer support, natural language processing and
text mining to further improve customer handling,
agent training, productivity and customer
satisfaction.

The Dynamics of Call Centers

To provide a number of services to business consumers,
there are categories of calls often separated into
outbound and inbound. Outbound calls happen when
agents place calls to potential customers mostly with
intentions of providing service to the individual or
selling. These calls are substantially different from
inbound calls, where consumers call the call center in
order to acquire information, ask for assistance, or
report possible malfunction.

Furthermore, the staffs working at call centers are
organized into a multi-tier support system to handle
calls efficiently. In such models, the first tier
normally consists of operators that direct inquiries
to the appropriate department and give general
directory information.

The second tier is forwarded with calls and handles
consumers in need of further assistance. If the second
tier of support cannot resolve the issue, the call is
then forwarded to the next tier. There are cases,
where the existence of three or more tiers is required
to resolve issues. Usually, the third tier of support
includes highly skilled support staffs, product
engineers, or product developers.

Due to the highly technological nature of the
operations of call centers, close monitoring of the
activities of the staff is widespread and easy. This
can be quite beneficial and enable the company to
better plan the time and workload of its employees.