A call center is a group of individuals who respond to customer inquiries to resolve issues, provide information, or update customers. Individuals can be in a single location, work across several buildings or cities, or even work from home. Customers may be internal to the same business (as in an IT Help Desk) or outside the organization (as in a paying customer for services). A call center may take incoming calls, make outgoing calls, and respond to inquiries via email, chat, or fax. A call center may be 24 x 7 x 365 or operate Monday to Friday, depending on the customer's needs. No two Call Centers are alike.
Not all Call Centers rely on technology to receive and direct incoming telephone calls. Simple instructions on any telephone system can easily handle this treatment. They may be suited for groups that handle a consistent or predictable amount of telephone calls by a consistent group of individuals adhering to a standard work schedule. Call Center technology, or Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), can route and prioritize calls by time of day, day of the week, number of connected calls, number of on-hold calls, or number of employees available to take calls. Calls can also be redirected to other locations in the event of a disaster or an incident affecting business operations at the primary location. In addition, an ACD will also produce reports informing a Call Center Manager of the workload and the performance of a team or individuals.
ACD group begins with a general business purpose: understanding the types of services delivered to the callers and the main number to receive direct and trigger events. Once this is understood, we identify the individuals who will answer the incoming calls. These individuals are "agents." The agent will use a desk phone or a soft client to access the ACD and log in, then instruct the ACD to direct or bypass the agent. The agent will use their phone to tell the ACD they are "available" to take a call, "unavailable" to receive a call, in "work" or wrapping up paperwork as a result of a call, or "Do Not Disturb," creating a metric that represents not call-related work, i.e., meetings.
IT Services is committed to ensuring that a Call Center Manager has the tools to redirect incoming customer calls to an alternate destination on demand. An alternate destination may be a different location, a different telephone number, or a unique emergency greeting. Each Call Center will be designed to provide Mobility and Unity Connection with minimal training.
You can expect to receive all the critical functional areas of today's call centers, including: