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For the contact centres in family law, see childrens cen- abling interactions that create value for the customer and
tre. organisation.[2] Contact centres, along with call centres
A call centre or call center is a centralised oce used and communication centres all fall under a larger um-
brella labelled as the contact centre management indus-
try. This is becoming a rapidly growing recruitment sec-
tor in itself, as the capabilities of contact centres expand
and thus require ever more complex systems and highly
skilled operational and management sta.[3]
The majority of large companies use contact centres as
a means of managing their customer interaction. These
centres can be operated by either an in house department
responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third
party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres).
1 History
A 1970 police call centre in Brierley Hill, England
The earliest call centres were created during the 1960s,
for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests and were known as Private Automated Business Ex-
by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a changes (PABX). The earliest example of a call centre
company to administer incoming product support or in- was in the UK is at the Birmingham Press and Mail.[4]
formation enquiries from consumers. Outbound call cen- They had a GEC PABX 4 ACD, installed in 1965.
tres are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of char- The coining of the term call centre is more recent, with
itable or political donations, debt collection and market the rst published use of the term in 1983.[5]
research. A contact centre is a location for centralised
handling of individual communications, including letters,
faxes, live support software, social media, instant mes-
sage, and e-mail.[1] 2 Technology
A call centre has an 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 indepen-
dently operated or networked with additional centres, of-
ten 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 tele- Workstation
phony integration.
The contact centre is a central point from which all cus-
tomer contacts are managed. Through contact centres,
valuable information about company are routed to appro-
priate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gath-
ered. It is generally a part of companys customer rela-
tionship management.
A contact centre can be dened as a coordinated sys- A typical call centre
tem of people, processes, technologies and strategies that telephone. Note: no handset, phone is for headset use
provides access to information, resources, and exper- only
tise, through appropriate channels of communication, en- Call-centre technology circa 2005
1
2 3 DESCRIPTION
Historically, call centres have been built on Private branch 3.1 Services
exchange (PBX) equipment that is owned, hosted, and
maintained by the call centre operator themselves. The
PBX can provide functions such as automatic call distri-
bution, interactive voice response, and skills-based rout-
ing.
Contact centres also carry out sales and marketing activ- contact centres are a model of contact centre that pro-
ities; these can be performed through cold calling strate- vide services on a pay per use model. The overheads
gies and increasingly through live chat applications on of the contact centre are shared by many clients, thereby
company websites. supporting a very cost eective model, especially for low
volumes of calls. Outsourced centres have grown in pop-
ularity. There is criticism of the outsourcing model.
3.2 Dynamics
Companies that regularly utilise outsourced contact
centre services include British Sky Broadcasting and
Orange[12] in the telecommunications industry, Adidas
in the sports and leisure sector,[13] Audi in car
manufacturing[14] and charities such as the RSPCA.
Outsourced call centres are often located in the
developing countries, where wages are signicantly
lower. The call centre industry in the Philippines and call
centre industry in the Bangladesh serve as good examples.
ical models beyond queueing, with operations research, Active & Waiting Calls: measures current volume of
which considers a wide range of optimisation problems active calls compared to the number of callers wait-
seeking to reduce waiting times while keeping server util- ing to be patched through to an agent. This is a real-
isation and therefore eciency high.[21] time status metric that should be shared with all the
agents to oer them insight on their performance.
Agents should be encouraged to resolve calls on a
4.2 Metrics timely basis in order to get to the next caller in queue
and not keep the callers on wait.
Some vital call centre performance metrics[22] are listed
below:
Call Abandonment: measures the number of calls
that are disconnected before they can be connected
Customer Satisfaction: a measure of how products to one of your agents. This metric is closely related
and services supplied by a company meet or sur- to Service Level and Customer Satisfaction. Cus-
pass customer expectation. C-SAT is based on cus- tomers are not expected to be patient. They will
tomers experience with the support or service. The hang up and possibly switch their brand loyalties.
scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to
10 scale.
Forecast Accuracy: better described as forecasted
Average Handling time: a key measure for any con- contact load vs actual contact load. It is a per-
tact centre planning system, as it tells you how long formance metric that reects the percent variance
a new item of work takes to be handled and not just between the number of inbound customer contacts
the talk time. forecasted for a particular time period and the num-
ber of said contacts actually received by the centre
Revenue Per Call: usually used in sales projects during that time period.
which calculates the eort of a representative with
respect to increasing sales. RPC can be calculated Sta Turnover/Retention: The best way to measure
by dividing the total amount of sale by total number the satisfaction of your workforce is to look at the
of calls. percentage of sta that leaves. There can be some
First Call Resolution: properly addressing the cus- telling information in these numbers and it is crucial
tomers need the rst time they call, thereby elimi- to track and analyse the turnover rates in many ways.
nating the need for the customer to follow up with a
second call. Up-Sell/ Cross-Sell Rate: simply the success rate of
generating revenue above the original intention of
Total Problem Resolution: percentage of time the the call. It is becoming an increasingly common
problem has been completely resolved from the cus- practice, not just for pure revenue-generating call
tomer point of view. This KPI is mostly used for: centres but for customer service centres as well.
Operational Excellence. This keeps troubleshooting
time to a minimum, which, according to industry
Sta Shrinkage: the percentage of time that employ-
averages, currently accounts for as much as 80 per-
ees are not available to handle calls. It is classied as
cent of total problem resolution time, and gets the
non-productive time, and is made up of meeting and
problem xed.
training time, breaks, paid time o, o-phone work,
Net Promoter Score: measures the loyalty that ex- and general unexplained time where agents are not
ists between a provider and a consumer. NPS is available to handle customer interactions.
based on a direct question: How likely is it that you
would recommend our company/product/service to Blockage:a measure of accessibility that indicates
a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is what percentage of customers will not be able to get
most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. in touch with the contact centre at a given time due
to insucient network facilities.
Quality Scores: by far the most common metric used.
It provides the ability to look at the overall caller ex-
perience and the conversations that agents are using Cost Per Call: A major factor determining revenue
on their phone calls. is the cost of running the organisation. A common
measure of operational eciency is cost incurred
Service Level Agreement: an agreement between two for each minute of handling the call workload, com-
or more parties where one is the customer and the monly referred to as Cost per Call. This cost per
others are service providers. The contract may in- call can be simply a labour cost per call, or it can be
volve nancial penalties and the right to terminate a fully loaded rate that includes payroll in addition
the contract if the SLA metrics are consistently to telecommunications, facilities, and other services
missed. costs.
5
Some critics of call centres argue that the work atmo- Long hours
sphere in such an environment is dehumanising.[23] Oth-
ers point to the low rates of pay and restrictive working Restrictive working practices (some operators are
practices of some employers.[24][25] There has been much required to follow a pre-written script)
controversy over such things as restricting the amount of
time that an employee can spend in the toilet.[26] Call cen- High stress: a common problem associated with
tres have also been the subject of complaints by callers front-end jobs where employees deal directly with
who nd the sta often do not have enough skill or au- customers
thority to resolve problems,[27] while the sta sometimes
appear apathetic.[28] Other research illustrates how call Repetitive job task
centre workers develop ways to counter or resist this en-
vironment by integrating local cultural sensibilities or em- Poor working conditions (e.g. poor facilities, poor
bracing a vision of a new life.[29] maintenance and cleaning, cramped working condi-
Telephone calls are easily monitored, and the close mon- tions, management interference, lack of privacy and
itoring of call centre sta is widespread.[30] This has the noisy)
benet[31] of helping the company to plan the workload
and time of its employees. However, it has also been ar- Lack of support for employees with impaired vision
gued that such close monitoring breaches the human right and hearing problems
to privacy.[32] Most call centres provide electronic reports
that outline performance metrics, quarterly highlights and Rude and abusive customers
other information about the calls made and received.
Criticisms of call centres generally follow a number of Lack of advancement opportunities (Most call cen-
common themes, from both callers and call centre sta. tre positions tend to be dead-end jobs until the em-
From callers, common criticisms include:[33] ployee decides to leave the company, resulting in
high turnover rates within the call centre)
Operators working from a script
The net-net of these concerns is that call centres as a busi-
Ignoring or delaying the calls from the more dicult
ness process exhibit levels of variability. The experience
customers (call screening)
a customer gets and the results a company achieves on
Incompetent or untrained operators incapable of a given call are almost totally dependent on the quality
processing customers requests eectively[34] of the agent answering that call.[35] Call centres are be-
ginning to address this by using agent-assisted automa-
Obsequious behaviour by operators (e.g., relentless tion to standardise the process all agents use.[36] Anton
use of sir, ma'am and I'd be more than happy and Phelps have provided a detailed manual on how to
to assist you) conduct the performance evaluation of the business,[37]
whereas others are using various scientic technologies to
Overseas location, with language and accent prob-
do the jobs.[38][39][40] However, more popular alternatives
lems
are using personality and skill based approaches.[41][42]
Touch tone menu systems and automated queuing The various challenges encountered by call operators are
systems discussed by several authors.[43][44][45][46][47]
7 Media portrayals [9] Kumar, Harish. Hosted Contact / Call Center Services
in Indian Telecommunications Licensing and Regulation.
Researchgate. p. 6. doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.2931.9445.
Indian call centres have been the focus of several doc-
umentary lms, the 2004 lm Thomas L. Friedman Re- [10] Raik Stolletz (2003). Performance Analysis and Optimiza-
porting: The Other Side of Outsourcing, the 2005 lms tion of Inbound Call Centers. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-
John and Jane, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, and 1- 3-540-00812-5.
800-India: Importing a White-Collar Economy, and the
2006 lm Bombay Calling, among others.[52] An Indian [11] Freeman, Laura M; Whiteld, Hilary C (1996). Setting
up for integrated inbound/outbound telemarketing.
call centre is also the subject of the 2006 lm Outsourced
BNET. Retrieved 2008-06-05.
(lm) and a key location in the 2008 lm, Slumdog Mil-
lionaire. The 2014 BBC y on the wall documentary se- [12] Orange currently outsources work to Indian units of Con-
ries The Call Centre gave an often distorted although hu- vergys Corp. The Wall Street Journal.
morous view of life in a Welsh call centre.[53]
[13] adidas setup a dedicated customer care centre. Adidas.
[7] M. Popovic and V. Kovacevic. An Approach to Internet- [26] Hazards 81 extended brieng: Toilet breaks: Give us a
Based Virtual Call Center Implementation. University of break!". Hazards. Retrieved 2008-06-05.
Novi Sad, Yugoslavia.
[27] Shaw, Russell (2006-01-30). Tone-deaf to customer
[8] David S. Joachim. Computer Technology Opens a World complaints, Dell opens yet another call center in India.
of Work to Disabled People. New York Times. ZDNet. Retrieved 2008-06-05.
7
[28] Ahmed, Zubair (2006-02-22). Abuse rattles Indian call [45] Murthy, Nagesh N.; Challagalla, G. N.; Vincent, L. H.;
centre sta. BBC News. Retrieved 2008-06-05. Shervani, T. A.; et al. (2008). The Impact of Simula-
tion Training on Call Center Agent Performance: A Field-
[29] Pal, Mahuya; Buzzanell, Patrice (2013). Breaking the Based Investigation. Management Science. 54 (2): 384
Myth of Indian Call Centers: A Postcolonial Analysis of 399. doi:10.1287/mnsc.1070.0818.
Resistance. Communication Monographs. 80 (2): 199.
doi:10.1080/03637751.2013.776172. [46] Armony, Mor; Itay Gurvich. When promotions meet op-
erations: cross-selling and its eect on call-center perfor-
[30] Call Centre Monitoring. Management. callcentre- mance (PDF). Retrieved 1 July 2008.
helper.com. Retrieved 2008-06-05.
[47] Goldberg, L.S.; A.A. Grandey. Display rules versus dis-
[31] The Call Center Answer Team reaches out to the industry play autonomy: emotion regulation, emotional exhaus-
for to crack a tough nut. Q&A: How Many Calls Should tion, and task performance in a call center simulation.
I Monitor. callcentermagazine.com. 2003-07-30. Re- Retrieved 1 July 2008.
trieved 2008-06-05.
[48] Kumar, Pradeep; Schenk, Christopher Robert (2006).
[32] Whos on the Line? Women in Call Centres Project Paths to Union Renewal. Broadview Press. ISBN 1-
(PDF). Atlantic Centre of Excellence for Womens Health. 55193-058-7.
Health Canada. Retrieved 2008-06-05.
[49] Improving Call Center Jobs a Top Priority for CWA Cus-
[33] If You Want to Scream, Press... - Preview. On- tomer Service. Communication Workers of America.
line.wsj.com. Retrieved 2012-01-28. Retrieved 2011-02-23.
[34] nationalcallcenters. Retrieved 2012-02-09. [50] Call Centre Union Busters Get Wake-Up Call. Workers
Online. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
[35] Fleming, J., Coman, C., Harter, J. (2005) Manage Your
Human Sigma, Harvard Business Review [51] Uni Global Unions call centre organising campaigns.
Uni Global Union. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
[36] NACC. Nationalcallcenters.org. Retrieved 2012-01-
28. [52] Hudson, Dale (2009), Undesirable Bodies and Desirable
Labor: Documenting the Globalization and Digitization
[37] Anton, Jon; Dru Phelps. How to conduct a call center of Transnational American Dreams in Indian Call Cen-
performance audit: A to Z (PDF). Retrieved 1 July 2008. ters, Cinema Journal 49 (1), pp. 82-102.
[38] Paprzycki, Marcin; et al. (2004). Data Mining Approach [53] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018vlpy
for Analyzing Call Center Performance. Berlin: Springer.
doi:10.1007/b97304. ISBN 978-3-540-22007-7.
[41] Skyrme, Pamela; et al. Using personality to predict out- Kennedy I., Call centres, School of Electrical and
bound call center job performance (PDF). Retrieved 1 Information Engineering, University of the Witwa-
July 2008. tersrand, 2003.
[42] Stolletz, Raik; Stefan Helber (2004). Performance anal- Masi D.M.B., Fischer M.J., Harris C.M., Numerical
ysis of an inbound call center with skills-based routing. Analysis of Routing Rules for Call centres, Telecom-
OR Spectrum. 26 (3): 331352. doi:10.1007/s00291-
munications Review, 1998, noblis.org
004-0161-y.
HSE website Psychosocial risk factors in call cen-
[43] Witt, L. A.; et al. (2004). When Conscientious-
ness Isn't Enough: Emotional Exhaustion and Perfor- tres: An evaluation of work design and well-being.
mance Among Call Center Customer Service Represen-
Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in In-
tatives. Journal of Management. 30 (1): 149160.
doi:10.1016/j.jm.2003.01.007. dias Call Center Industry (Stanford University Press;
2010) 219 pages; traces changing views of womens
[44] Aguir, Salah; Karaesmen, Fikri; Aksin, O. Zeynep; Chau- work in India under globalization.
vet, Fabrice; et al. (2004). The impact of retrials on
call center performance. OR Spectrum. 26 (3): 353376. Fluss, Donna, The Real-Time Contact centre,
doi:10.1007/s00291-004-0165-7. 2005 AMACOM
8 11 EXTERNAL LINKS
11 External links
Media related to call centres at Wikimedia Com-
mons
Mandelbaum, Avishai Call Centers (Centres) Re-
search Bibliography with Abstracts. Faculty of In-
dustrial Engineering and Management, Technion-
Israel Institute of Technology.
9
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