Call Center

A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letter, fax, live support software, and e-mail at one location is known as a contact centre. A call centre is operated through an extensive open workspace for call centre 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 centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI). A contact centre, also known as customer interaction centre is a central point of any organization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by telephone, email, online chat, fax, and instant message.

IVR

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is an automated telephony system that interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the appropriate recipient. An IVR system (IVRS) accepts a combination of voice telephone input and touch-tone keypad selection and provides appropriate responses in the form of voice, fax, callback, e-mail and perhaps other media. An IVR system consists of telephony equipment, software applications, a database and a supporting infrastructure. Common IVR applications include:

• Bank and stock account balances and transfers
• Surveys and polls
• Office call routing
• Call center forwarding
• Simple order entry transactions
• Selective information lookup (movie schedules, etc.)

An IVR application provides pre-recorded voice responses for appropriate situations, keypad signal logic, access to relevant data and, potentially, the ability to record voice input for later handling. Using computer telephony integration (CTI), IVR applications can hand off a call to a human being who can view data related to the caller at a display.