Call centre

A very large call centre in Lakeland, Florida (2006)

Answering services, as known in the 1960s through the 1980s, earlier and slightly later, involved a business that specifically provided the service. Primarily by the use of an off-premises extension (OPX) for each subscribing business, connected at a switchboard at the answering service business, the answering service would answer the otherwise unattended phones of the subscribing businesses with a live operator. The live operator could take messages or relay information, doing so with greater human interactivity than a mechanical answering machine. Although undoubtedly more costly (the human service, the cost of setting up and paying the phone company for the OPX on a monthly basis), it had the advantage of being more ready to respond to the unique needs of after-hours callers. The answering service operators also had the option of calling the client and alerting them to, particularly important calls.

The origins of call centers date back to the 1960s with the UK-based Birmingham Press and Mail, which installed Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX) to have rows of agents handling customer contacts.[2][3] By 1973, call centers received mainstream attention after Rockwell International patented its Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor (GACD) for a telephone booking system as well as the popularization of telephone headsets as seen on televised NASA Mission Control Center events.[4][5]

During the late 1970s, call center technology expanded to include telephone sales, airline reservations, and banking systems. The term "call center" was first published and recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1983. The 1980s experienced the development of toll-free telephone numbers to increase the efficiency of agents and overall call volume. Call centers increased with the deregulation of long-distance calling and growth in information-dependent industries.[6]

As call centres expanded, unionisation occurred in North America to gain members[7] including the Communications Workers of America[8] and the United Steelworkers. In Australia, the National Union of Workers represents unionised workers; their activities form part of the Australian labour movement.[9] In Europe, Uni Global Union of Switzerland is involved in assisting unionisation in this realm[10] and in Germany Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft represents call centre workers.

During the 1990s, call centres expanded internationally and developed into two additional subsets of communication, contact centres, and outsourced bureau centres. A contact centre is defined as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies, and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for the customer and organization.[11][12] In contrast to in-house management, outsourced bureau contact centres are a model of contact centre that provide services on a "pay per use" model. The overheads of the contact centre are shared by many clients, thereby supporting a very cost effective model, especially for low volumes of calls. The modern contact centre includes automated call blending of inbound and outbound calls as well as predictive dialing capabilities dramatically increasing agents productivity. Latest implementations with more complex systems, require highly skilled operational and management staff that can use multichannel online and offline tools to improve customer interactions.[13][14][15]

Call centre worker confined to a small workstation/booth, using CallWeb Internet-based survey software

Workstation

A typical call centre telephone. Note: no handset; phone is for headset use only

Call-centre technology circa 2005

Call centre technologies include: speech recognition software which allowed Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to handle first levels of customer support, text mining, natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training via interactive scripting and automatic mining using best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns. This allows inbound calls to be directly routed to the appropriate agent for the task, whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in.

For outbound calls, lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors, past performance, and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead.

The universal queue standardises the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email. The virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.

Call centres have received criticism for low pay rates and restrictive working practices for employees, which have been deemed as a dehumanising environment.[28][29][30] Other research illustrates how call centre workers develop ways to counter or resist this environment by integrating local cultural sensibilities or embracing a vision of a new life.[31] Most call centres provide electronic reports that outline performance metrics, quarterly highlights and other information about the calls made and received. This has the benefit[32] of helping the company to plan the workload and time of its employees. However, it has also been argued that such close monitoring breaches the human right to privacy.[33]

Complaints are often logged by callers who find the staff do not have enough skill or authority to resolve problems,[34] as well as appearing apathetic.[35] These concerns are due to a business process that exhibits levels of variability because the experience a customer gets and results a company achieves on a given call are dependent upon the quality of the agent.[36] Call centres are beginning to address this by using agent-assisted automation to standardise the process all agents use.[37][38][39] However, more popular alternatives are using personality and skill based approaches.[40][41] The various challenges encountered by call operators are discussed by several authors.[42][43][44][45][46]

Indian call centres have been the focus of several documentary films, the 2004 film Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: The Other Side of Outsourcing, the 2005 films John and Jane, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, and 1-800-India: Importing a White-Collar Economy, and the 2006 film Bombay Calling, among others.[47] An Indian call centre is also the subject of the 2006 film Outsourced and a key location in the 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire. The 2014 BBC fly on the wall documentary series The Call Centre gave an often distorted although humorous view of life in a Welsh call centre.[48]

• Automatic call distributor
• Business process outsourcing
• Call management
• List of call centre companies
• Predictive dialling
• Operator messaging
• Queue management system
• Skills based routing
• Virtual queue
• The Call Centre, a BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary at a Welsh call centre
•  Business portal
•  Telephones portal

• Cusack M., "Online Customer Care", American Society for Quality (ASQ) Press, 2000.
• Cleveland B., "Call Center Management on Fast Forward", ICMI Press, 2006.
• Kennedy I., Call centres, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, 2003.
• Masi D.M.B., Fischer M.J., Harris C.M., Numerical Analysis of Routing Rules for Call centres, Telecommunications Review, 1998, noblis.org
• HSE website Psychosocial risk factors in call centres: An evaluation of work design and well-being.
• Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in India's Call Center Industry (Stanford University Press; 2010) 219 pages; traces changing views of "women's work" in India under globalization.
• Fluss, Donna, "The Real-Time Contact centre", 2005 AMACOM
• Wegge, J., van Dick, R., Fisher, G., Wecking, C., & Moltzen, K. (2006, January). Work motivation, organisational identification, and well-being in call centre work. Work & Stress, 20(1), 60–83.
• Legros, B. (2016). Unintended consequences of optimizing a queue discipline for a service level defined by a percentile of the waiting time. Operations Research Letters, 44(6), 839–845.

• Media related to call centres at Wikimedia Commons
• Mandelbaum, Avishai Call Centers (Centres) Research Bibliography with Abstracts. Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.