What is a Call Center?

1. Call Center
What Is A Call Center?
Call centers special offices that are purpose-built to handle a large volume of
phone calls. Call centers typically handle customer service, support,
telemarketing, telesales and collections functions. The employees who staff
call centers are referred to as “agents” or “customer service representatives”
(frequently abbreviated as CSRs). Call centers range from very small informal
operations to massive, highly optimized sites with hundreds or even thousands
of agents.
Call centers use specialized telephone equipment to maximize productivity.
Specialized telephony switching systems called “Automatic Call Distributors”
or ACDs are used to queue and route inbound calls to agents based on a
wide variety of criteria. Outbound calls are frequently generated by an
automated system called a “Predictive Dialer” that monitors the status of
agents and places calls on their behalf. Other common call center tools
include desktop integration (frequently referred to as “screen pop”),
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)applications, call recording solutions,
productivity monitoring utilities, workforce planning systems and various
methods of historical and near real-time reporting.
Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)
An ACD is a specialized phone system that routes (distributes)
incoming calls to teams of agents assigned to various call queues. Queues
are simply ordered list of calls to be dispatched to agents. The ACD oversees
the process of placing incoming calls into the proper queue, assigning priority
to those calls based on various factors (the order of their arrival, the
importance of the caller, the urgency of the caller’s situation), and ultimately
dispatching those calls to an available agent. The algorithm by which calls
are dispatched is called the queue strategy.

2. Queue Strategies
A simple ACD system consists of a source of calls (a pool of
lines, trunks or virtual trunks), a FIFO (first-in, first-out)queue and a pool of
agents who are selected using a “ring-all” strategy. In this case, when a call
arrives the system rings the phones of all agents who are not already on a
call. The first agent to answer the call is connected with the calling party. All
the other phones stop ringing.
A more complex (and likely more useful) configuration would have the call
offered to the agent who had been in the idle state longest. This “most idle”
strategy is frequently used when all agents are considered equally qualified
to handle a task. Other common strategies include round robin, linear hunt,
least-recently-called, fewest calls and random. In some cases, the ACD can
weight its selection based on the caller’s need (generally collected using an
IVR application) and a list of skills associated with each agent. This is generally
referred to as “skills-based routing”.
Caller Experience
While waiting in queue, callers generally hear a combination of
marketing messages, queue status messages and music. Marketing messages
are simply audio recordings that are piped into the queue on a periodic
basis. Status messages provide the caller with specific information about their
status — the number of callers ahead of them in the queue, the estimated
wait time and sometimes alternatives to waiting in queue. Some more
advanced call queueing systems support virtual queueing. A virtual queueing
system allows callers to provide a callback number, then disconnect. Their
position in the queue is preserved and when an agent becomes available
the system places an outbound call to the caller.
Dialers
Outbound call centers frequently use a dialer application to
connect agents with targets. Dialers can be simple desktop applications that
implement a basic “click-to-call” function, or much more advanced systems

3. Desktop Dialer
Desktop dialer applications are generally integrated with
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)software or other business
applications. When an agent needs to make a call, the click a button or link
in the dialer application rather than manually entering the digits on the
keypad of their phone. The dialer application then places the call on their
behalf by sending a command to the phone (known as “first person”
integration)or to the phone system (known as “third person” integration).
Automating the dialing process reduces errors and increases productivity.
Power Dialer
Large-scale cold-calling operations commonly associated with
tele-sales, collections and political campaigns, require more aggressive dialer
systems. Some of these are simply “power dialers” which essentially place one
outbound call for each available agent. When an agent hangs up, the
system automatically dials another call and connects it to the agent’s phone.
This pattern continues as long as the agent remains logged into the system.
Power dialers allow an outbound call center to place far more calls than
could be accomplished manually. However, there is still some agent time
wasted handling calls that do not connect, reach answering machines or
otherwise fail to reach the target.
Predictive Dialer
Predictive dialers are essentially smarter power dialers. They carefully
monitor the average handle time for each agent and attempt to predict
when an agent will become available. Rather than placing calls on a one-
agent-to-one-call basis, they place more calls than there are agents
available. When a call is answered the system uses various methods to
determine if the answering party is a human or an answering machine.
Answering machines are either dropped or fed a pre-recorded message
while live answers are handed off to agents.

4. Robo Dialer
Sometimes dialer systems are completely automated. These place
calls then play messages to the answering party or machine. These systems
are commonly used for notification purposes (i.e. reminder of a doctor’s
appointment, notice that school has been cancelled) as well as marketing
and political messaging. Some automatic dialer systems support additional
features like surveys or transfers to live agents.
Dialer Considerations
In most jurisdictions there are many laws governing the use of
dialers. Before deploying a dialer be certain to review these to avoid
significant penalties or even criminal charges.
Adjunct Technologies
While ACDs and dialer systems are quite powerful on their own,
interconnecting them with a number of related technologies has the
potential to increase the efficiency and in some cases improve customer
experience.
Automated Attendant
Automated attendant systems have long been paired with ACDs,
allowing callers to route themselves into the appropriate call queue.
Automated attendants are simply menu systems that prompt callers to
indicate their preference using the keys on their phone or, in some cases, by
speaking keywords. Callers are generally willing to accept up to two levels of
menu before reaching a live agent. More than two levels tends to annoy
most callers and can result in an increase in abandoned calls.

5. Interactive Voice Response
Interactive Voice Response or IVR applications are another
technology frequently integrated with ACDs. IVR systems prompt callers for
data items — things like account numbers, prescription refill codes or
package tracking numbers — and use those values to look up caller-specific
information from remote data sources. In some cases the IVR application can
handle an entire transaction without human intervention. In other cases the
IVR feeds data to the ACD to help it route the call appropriately.
CTI / Screen Pop
To increase agent productivity, desktop business applications are
frequently integrated with the ACD in such a way that data related to the
caller is automatically displayed when a call is delivered. This is commonly
referred to as either “Computer-Telephony Integration” or simply as a “screen
pop”. There are several ways to accomplish this. In some cases the business
applications support a CTI standard like TAPI or TSAPI. In other cases the
applications are custom and communicate directly with the ACD or a “CTI
server” that acts as a proxy for the ACD.
Call Recording
Call centers frequently record calls either to monitor the
performance of their agents or for regulatory compliance. Call recording
systems handle the process of capturing the audio from all participants in the
call, mixing it, storing it and producing an index that allows administrators or
regulators to locate and review recordings. A properly built recording system
makes it easy to pinpoint conversations using common keys including Caller
ID, date, time and agent ID.
Asterisk In The Call Center
Asterisk is a powerful tool for building call center systems and solutions.Withsupport support for call
queues, IVRs,outbound dialing, recording,live monitoring and reporting,Asterisk includes virtually
everything you need to create a working call center.Small and informal call centers can be built using
a single Asterisk server or deployedfrom a turn-key IP PBX. Enterprise call centers generallymake use of
a cluster of Asterisk systems structuredto scale as the business grows. Call centers withlegacyACD
systems frequentlyuse Asterisk as an adjunct, acting as the IVR front-endto a skills-basedrouting
solution.