A Contact Center,  Call Center, or Call Centre,  is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests or transactions by telephone. A Contact Center is operated by a company to administer incoming product sales, support, or information inquiries (customer service) from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a Contact Center, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location is also known as a contact center.

A Contact Center is often operated through an extensive open workspace for Contact Center 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 centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).

Most major businesses use Contact Centers to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalog or Internet retailers, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through Contact Centers. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.

A contact center, also known as a customer interaction center is a central point of any organization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information about a company can be 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 calling, emailing, chatting on-line, visiting websites, faxing, instant messaging, or communicating through social networking (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

Contact Center technology and processes are subject to constant improvements and innovations. Some of these technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of 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, whereby inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task, whilst minimizing wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in, as well as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead. The concept of the Universal Queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email whilst the concept of a Virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.

Premise-based Call Center Technology historically has been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the call center operator. The PBX might provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The call center operator would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor.

However Virtual Call Center Technology is now very common. With the advent of the Software as a service technology delivery model, the virtual call center has emerged. In a virtual call center model, the call centers operator does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call center runs on. Instead, they subscribe to a service for a monthly or annual fee with a service provider that hosts the call center telephony equipment in their own data center. Such a vendor may host many call centers on their equipment. Agents connect to the vendor’s equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, or over Voice over IP. Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or terminate at the vendor’s data center, rather than at the call center operator’s premise. The vendor’s telephony equipment then connects the calls to the call center operator’s agents.  Virtual Call Center Technology allows people to work from home, instead of in a traditional, centralized, call center location, which increasingly allows people with physical or other disabilities that prevent them from leaving the house, to work.

Cloud Computing for Call Centers is a more recent innovation.  Cloud computing for call centers extends cloud computing to Software as a service, or hosted, on-demand call centers by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) on the call center cloud computing platform that allow call center functionality to be integrated with cloud-based Customer relationship management, such as Salesforce.com and leads management and other applications.  The APIs typically provide programmatic access to two key groups of features in the call center platform:

1. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) APIs provide developers with access to basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling on the call center platform from a separate application.
2. Configuration APIs provide programmatic control of administrative functions of the call center platform which are typically accessed by a human administrator through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Types of Contact Centers are categorized by their calls, divided into outbound and inbound. Inbound calls are calls that are made by the consumer to obtain information, report a malfunction, or ask for help. These calls are substantially different from outbound calls, where agents place calls to potential customers mostly with intentions of selling or service to the individual (telemarketing). It is possible to combine inbound and outbound campaigns, as well as blend customer services and technical support, all into a single center.

Contact Center staff are often organized into a multi-tier support system for a more efficient handling of calls. In a customer service or technical support process – the first tier in such a model consists of operators, who direct inquiries to the appropriate department and provide general directory information. If a caller requires more assistance, the call is forwarded to the second tier, where most issues can be resolved. In some cases, there may be three or more tiers of support staff. If a caller requires more assistance, the caller is forwarded to the third tier of support; typically the third tier of support is formed by product engineers/developers or highly skilled technical support staff of the product.

Owing to the highly technological nature of the operations in such offices, the close monitoring of staff activities is easy and widespread. This can be argued to be beneficial, to enable the company to better plan the workload and time of its employees, as well as identify weaknesses in a program, or the need for improved training.

Some variations of Contact Center models are:

• Contact centre – Supports interaction with customers over a variety of media, including but not necessarily limited to telephony, e-mail and internet chat.

• Inbound Contact Center – Exclusively or predominantly handles inbound calls (calls initiated by the customer).

• Outbound Contact Center – One in which Contact Center agents make outbound calls to customers or sales leads.

• Blended Contact Center – Combining automatic call distribution for incoming calls with predictive dialling for outbound calls, it makes more efficient use of agent time as each type of agent (inbound or outbound) can handle the overflow of the other.

• Outsourced bureau contact centers are a model of contact center that provide services on a “pay per use” model. The overheads of the contact center are shared by many clients thereby supporting a very cost effective model especially for low volumes of calls. Bureau contact centres provide an opportunity for:

• Pilot schemes – perform test of concept for new models for communications, sales or customer services before investing in staff and infrastructure
• Flexible solutions for SME’s – small or medium-size enterprises can benefit from a flexible service that can evolve with the businss
• Best of breed systems/technology – clients can benefit from considerable investment into communications technology, leveraging benefits without having to invest in large cap-ex projects.

Currently, there are no universally bracketable international standards, other than ISO 9000 series, available for the industry to follow. However, some of the relevant standards are loosely published by ISO with the division of ICS 33.040.35. Most of the standards under this division have not been reviewed thoroughly, but there are some guidelines and standing operating procedures available on the internet.