CALL CENTRES

CALL CENTRES

If you make customers unhappy in the real world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.                                  — Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com

Any successful large company spread trans-globally, say Citibank, can expect to receive thousands of telephone calls 24/7. Over 75 percent of these will come from across the seas, from countries where they have their many branches running. The company will be inundated by the sheer volume of calls originating every second! That’s perfectly natural; what’s 10 am in Dhaka is 10 pm in New York, with time zones split so widely. A working day call in USA will be an evening or night-most often late night call in say, Bangkok. 

A call centre is a simple solution to handle the volume of calls. Every country that the company has presence in has a dedicated office to take all calls from within that country, and reduce the volume of calls to its main office to zero, or thereabouts. Such a centralised office handles all matters related to that company’s local operations, receiving a manageable volume of requests by telephone and responding to calls asking for special or specific advice, be it administrative, financial or technical. 

There are two types of call centres, depending on the nature of services provided. These are:

·         Inbound Call Centres: Companies operate inbound call centres to service incoming calls from customers on product support and generalised information inquiries.

·         Outbound Call Centres: Companies operate outbound call centres for telemarketing, soliciting donations for charitable cause, political corpus building, debt recovery, market research, etc. 

                                        

 

A Call Centre in India                                                                                                        Source: www.forbes.com

 

Call centres usually have a large, well lit and open workspace with seats reserved for that centre’s agents. These seats are called work stations; each work station today includes a dedicated computer for every agent, a telephone headset linked electronically to other stations as well as to the shift supervisor. Call centres can be independent or part of a network with other centres, using local area networks (LAN). As technology jumps in leaps and bounds, voice & data routing inbound to any centre today are interlinked using something novel, the so-called computer telephony integration.