Call Center or Call Centre

A centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of request by telephone. It is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, and debt collection is also made. In addition to call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, e-mails at one location is known as contact centre. A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, 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).