Connect with UsWhat is a Call Center?If you've ever...
Sophisticated call centers, now handle more than just calls. In today's day and age communication is also received and sent by email, chat, SMS, and fax. In the broadest of terms, a call center is a location with agents or operators staffing banks of phones to either make outgoing, or field incoming, telephone calls for a company or organization, whether large or small. Typically, these are centers that handle one or many different types of services such as help desk, lead generation, emergency response, telephone answering service, outbound telemarketing, direct response and customer service, to name just a few. Call center services are traditionally divided into two categories. At their simplest, inbound call centers receive calls on behalf of a client or organization, whereas outbound call centers place calls on behalf of a client or organization. Inbound call centers assist with any number of services including help desk calls, direct marketing calls, emergency response calls or answering service calls. Outbound call centers, on the other hand, are responsible for various types of telemarketing initiatives and campaigns, such as not-for-profit and fundraising calls, contact list cleaning and updating, verification services, and selling products or services, polling and/or other like market research services. Inbound call centers are generally measured or benchmarked against their responsiveness to calls -- a frustrated customer kept on hold can mean the difference between retaining or losing a customer. Outbound call centers are generally measured or benchmarked against the number of successful contacts made, whether in selling or in providing key information. |
