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The Indian Call Center Journey

            

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Call Center Basics

In 2001, the global call center industry was worth $ 800 mn spread across around 100,000 units. It was expected to touch the 300,000 level by 2002 employing approximately 18 mn people. Broadly speaking, a call center was a facility handling large volumes of inbound and outbound telephone calls, manned by 'agents,' (the people working at the center). In certain setups, the caller and the call center shared costs, while in certain other cases, the clients bore the call's cost. The call center could be situated anywhere in the world, irrespective of the client company's customer base. Call centers date back to the 1970s, when the travel/hospitality industry in the US began to centralize their reservation centers. With the rise of catalog shopping and outbound telemarketing, call centers became necessary for many industries. Each industry had its own way of operating these centers, with its own standards for quality, and its own preferred technologies.

The total number of people who worked at the center at any given point of time were referred to as 'seats.' A center could range from a small 5-10 seat set-up to a huge set-up with 500-2,000 seats.

The calls could be for customer service, sales, marketing or technical support in areas such as airline/hotel reservations, banking or regarding telemarketing, market research, etc.

For instance, while a FMCG company could use the call centers for better customer relationship management, for a biotechnology company, the task could be of verifying genetic databases. (Refer Table I). Call centers began as huge establishments managing large volumes of communications and traffic.

These centers were generally set up as large rooms, with workstations, interactive voice response systems, an EPABX,3 headsets hooked into a large telecom switch and one or more supervisor stations. (Refer Table II). The center was either an independent entity, or was linked with other centers or to a corporate data network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs4. Call centers could either be 'captive/in-house' or in form of an 'outsourced bureau.' Captive call centers were typically used by various segments like insurance, investments and securities, retail banking, other financial services, telecommunications, technology, utilities, manufacturing, travel and tourism, transport, entertainment, healthcare and education etc.

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3] Electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange.

4] Local Area Network (LAN) is a network of interconnected workstations sharing the resources of a single processor or server within a relatively small geographic area.