Call center
Call center was invented 30 years ago to quickly answer customers' questions. The greatest development of call centers started in 90s when the first professional software tools to manage communication with customers appeared. Those applications had a huge impact on increasing marketing capabilities of those centers. Nowadays, call center is a customer service center where employees respond clients' questions through the telephones by giving them professional information about the product and services. Experts believe that a modern call center should use the CRM system. The main procedures for the call center system can be divided into the following elements:
- a conversation ; welcome and introduction, connecting a call, receiving a message and passing it on, caller's problem recognition, ending a conversation,
- delicate and difficult situations ; standards for responding to the roused customer, standards for responding to complaints, rules of speaking about co-workers and superiors, conducting private conversations.
The most important thing for call center is customer relationship management which is used to identify the client.
The main tasks of call center is to enable the handling of inbound and outbound contacts and operating indirect processes, as well as monitoring of the job queue.
Forms of actions taken by the call centers are: telemarketing campaigns, support hotline, telephone contact, contact by mail or e-mail, telephone interviews, statistical analysis on effectiveness of advertising campaigns, brokerage in the field of databases, realization of advertising campaigns in the media, loyalty programms.
| Call center — recommended articles |
| Marketing research — Call system — Service bureau — Holistic marketing — Internal marketing — Process of business communication — Customer service office — Asynchronous communication — Outsource marketing |
References
- Garnett, O., Mandelbaum, A., & Reiman, M. (2002). Designing a call center with impatient customers. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 4(3), 208-227.
- Feinberg, R. A., Kim, I. S., Hokama, L., de Ruyter, K., & Keen, C. (2000). Operational determinants of caller satisfaction in the call center. International Journal of Service Industry Management, 11(2), 131-141.
- Whitt, W. (2005). Engineering solution of a basic call-center model. Management Science, 51(2), 221-235.
Author: Dominika Wiśniowska
