A location equipped with a contact center system and several agent stations (typically equipped with a desktop computer and phone) where your employees can answer a high volume of customer calls.
A call centre (British and Commonwealth spelling) or call center (US spelling; see spelling differences) is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product or service support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are operated for telemarketing, for solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection, market research, emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs blood banks. A contact centre, further extension to call centres administers centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.
A call centre has an open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer and display for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch or to an inbound/outbound call management system, 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, microcomputer/servers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.
The contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company's customer relationship management infrastructure. The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their customer interactions. 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).