What is a Call Centre?
Summary: This module starts first by defining Call Centres, then looks at the technology behind call centres, management of call centres, forecasting in call centres, and performance of call centres.
A call centre (Commonwealth English) or call center (American English) is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquires from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact centre.
A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace, with work stations that include a computer, 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).
Most major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centres. Examples of this include help desks and sales support.
Mathematical theory
Queueing theory mathematics can be used to demonstrate that a single large call centre is more effective at answering calls than several smaller centres. The most dramatic improvements come when a large number of offices are centralized. The mathematical problems encountered in a call centre are generally statistical in nature and revolve around the probability that an arriving call will be answered by an available and appropriately trained person. Forecasting the call arrival rates and then scheduling the number of staff required on duty at particular times of the day are problems faced by most call center managers.
Accommodation
The centralization of call management aims to improve a company's operations and reduce costs, while providing a standardized, streamlined, uniform service for consumers, making this approach is ideal for large companies with extensive customer support needs. To accommodate for such a large customer base, large warehouses are often converted to office space to host all call centre operations under one roof.
Personnel management
Centralized offices mean that large numbers of workers can be managed and controlled by a relatively small number of managers and support staff. They are often supported by computer technology that manages, measures and monitors the performance and activities of the workers. Call centre staff are closely monitored for quality control, level of proficiency, and customer service. Typical contact center operations focus on the discipline areas of workforce management, queue management, quality monitoring, and reporting. Reporting monitoring in a call centre can be further broken down into real time reporting and historical reporting. The types of information collected for a group of call centre agents include: agents logged in, agents ready to take calls, agents available to take calls, agents in wrap up mode, average call duration, average call duration including wrap-up time, longest duration agent available, longest duration call in queue, number of calls in queue, number of calls offered, number of calls abandoned, average speed to answer, average speed to abandoned and service level, calculated by the percentage of calls answered in under a certain time period.
Many call centres use workforce management software, which is software that uses historical information coupled with projected need to generate automated schedules. This aims to provide adequate staffing skilled enough to assist callers. The relatively high cost of personnel and worker inefficiency accounts for the majority of call centre operating expenses, influencing outsourcing in the call centre industry. Inadequate computer systems can mean staff take one or two seconds longer than necessary to process a transaction. This can often be quantified in staff cost terms. This is often used as a driving factor in any business case to justify a complete system upgrade or replacement. For several factors, including the efficiency of the call centre, the level of computer and telecom support that may be adequate for staff in a typical branch office may prove totally inadequate in a call centre.
Management of call centres
Management of call centres involves balancing the requirements of cost effectiveness and service. Callers do not wish to wait in exorbitantly long queues until they can be helped and so management must provide sufficient staff and inbound capacity to ensure that the quality of service is maintained. However, staff costs generally form more than half the cost of running a call centre and so management must minimise the number of staff present. To perform this balancing act, call centre managers make use of demand estimation, Telecommunication forecasting and dimensioning techniques to determine the level of staff required at any time. Managers must take into account staff tea and lunch breaks and must determine the number of agents required on duty at any one time.
Forecasting demand
Forecasting results are vital in making management decisions in call centres. Forecasting methods rely on data acquired from various sources including historical data, trend data and so on. Forecasting methods must predict the traffic intensity within the call centre in quarter-hour increments and these results must be converted to staffing rosters. Special attention must be paid to the busy hour. Forecasting methods must be used to pre-empt a situation where equipment needs to be upgraded as traffic intensity has exceeded the maximum capacity of the call centre.
Additional issues in call centres
There are many other issues that have to be planned for when managing a call centre. A few of these issues are listed below:
- Planning for failure of equipment
- Need for flexibility in meal-times
- Need for job variety and training
- Job exhaustion and stress
- Staff turnover
References:
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 Centers, Telecommunications Review, 1998.
Wikipedia 2006. Last Accessed on 13 March 2006
Comments, questions, feedback, criticisms?
Send feedback
- E-mail the author of the module, What is a Call Centre?
Footer
More about this content: Metadata | Version History
This work is licensed by Lekulana Kolobe under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0).
Last edited by Lekulana Kolobe on Feb 15, 2006 9:44 am US/Central.