1. What is a contact center?

A contact center is a place where telephone calls are either placed or received in high volume. A contact center is the focal point of customer service for most companies today. Using a variety of technologies, contact centers connect the customer and the organization, in real-time, to provide customer service. Contact centers take on different forms. A contact center can provide pre-sales, sales and sales support or a variety of other types of service.

2. How did the contact center industry originate?

Something around 30 years ago, the travel and hospitality industry began to centralize their reservation centers into what we would recognize now as huge contact centers. This happened at around the time the first large-scale high-volume premise-based telephone switches became available. Banks have also used them since the 1970s, and later in that decade, with the rise of the catalog shopping movement and outbound telemarketing, contact centers became staple within many industries. Each industry, however, had its own way of operating centers, its own standards for quality, and its own preferred technologies. This balkanization of the industry persisted until early in the 1990s, when contact center managers became more recognized as having a consistent set of skills and an operational knowledge.

3. What's the difference between inbound and outbound centers?

Literally, an inbound center is one that handles calls coming in from outside, most often through toll free numbers. These calls are primarily service, support, and inbound sales. An outbound center is one that does mainly outgoing telemarketing calls. Inbound is the biggest component of contact center traffic these days, though perversely, outbound represents the area of largest projected growth in the next few years. In truth, the majority of centers contain some element of both inbound and outbound.

4. Who handles calls in a contact center?

CSR - Customer service representative

5. What does a CSR do?

A CSR answers or makes the calls. He handles customer queries and complaints. He is required to have good communication skills. A CSR ensures that the customer experience is the best it can possibly be.

6. What are the skills required for a CSR?

1. They should have core training in customer-interaction essentials. How to speak to people intelligently, politely, empathetically, without sounding like a machine. These are the people skills.
2. Training in the specific tools they need for their job: how to operate the call master, desktop and software they need to manage the flow of a call.
3. Training in what the company does, and what are the particular products they sell or service are like.
4. Training in general contact center operations; that is, how to be productive with their time, when it's ok to take a break, what it means when you leave customers on hold, how their own productivity is measured, and that of the group and the center as a whole.

7. Why are contact centers constantly called other things, like "contact centers," "customer care centers," "support centers," and ugly constructions like "customer contact zones" or "multimedia access centers"?

These terms are the industry's ongoing attempt to come to grips with changes in what a contact center is supposed to do. Now that you have contact centers that answer e-mail, engage in live internet chat sessions with customers and sometimes even transmit live video, people are looking for a broader definition to replace "contact center." Rest assured, they all mean basically the same thing.

8. What does BPO stand for? What does it mean?

BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. Major corporations in the US and Europe are outsourcing their back office operations to India to save costs. E.g. employee payroll is maintained in India for their employees worldwide.

9. Can medical transcriptions be considered as BPO?

Yes.

10. What is DNC [Do Not Call] list?

US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Telemarketing Sales Rule bars companies from calling individuals who have registered themselves on DNC list. This hurts contact centers that make outbound calls [cold calling]. This rule came into effect from October 1, 2003. As of Sept 1, 2003 about 48 million individuals have registered on the DNC registry. If a company calls an individual on the DNC list, the fine can be approximately $11,000. Contact centers have bought insurance to protect themselves from being fined.

11. Is there any restriction about women working in contact centers at night?

In Karnataka, the Legislative Assembly passed a bill in August 2002 which provides for the use of services of women employees during night. Section 25 of the Act was modified to accommodate this change. It is likely that all other states have a similar law