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Call centre
A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a
large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a
company to administer incoming product support or information enquiries from
consumers. Outbound call centres are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of
charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. A contact
centre is a location for centralised handling of individual communications, including
letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.[1]

A call centre has an open workspace for call centre 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.

The contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed.
Through contact centres, valuable information about company are routed to
appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a
part of companys customer relationship management.

A contact centre can be defined as a coordinated system of people, processes,

technologies and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and
expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions
that create value for the customer and organisation.[2] Contact centres, along with
call centres and communication centres all fall under a larger umbrella labelled as
the contact centre management industry. This is becoming a rapidly growing
recruitment sector in itself, as the capabilities of contact centres expand and thus

require ever more complex systems and highly skilled operational and management
staff.[3]

The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their
customer interaction. These centres can be operated by either an in house
department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third party agency
(known as Outsourcing Call Centres).

Performance Matrix
Call center

parameters

1. Average
Talk time per caller (ATT).
2. Average
Handling Time (to get this data one should add average talk
time per
person (ATT), hold time and wrap up time) (AHT).
3. Service Level it is the percentage of calls answered within a decided time frame (SL).
4. Call answered per hour per agent (CPH).
5. Average Hold time the time a caller has been put on hold (AHT).
6. First Call Resolution it is the percentage of calls in which the callers query has been
completely resolved in the first call itself (and the caller will not have to call back again for the
same query) (FCR).
7. Abandon Rate - it is the percentage of calls that have been abandoned (i.e., could not be
serviced) (AR).
8. Idle Time it is the percentage of time that an agent has been idle (services no calls) (IT).
How to evaluate a call
To evaluate a call a Team Leader listens to a call being serviced by an agent (without letting the
customer know) and scores the agent on the following parameters:
1. Courtesy: How courteous was the agent? How did he/she start and end of the call?
2. Accuracy: Was the information given by the agent correct? Did he/she give correct
information to the customers query?
3. Service Excellence: Did the agent provide the customer with the additional information
that would prevent him from calling back? Did the agent cross sell a product/service?

What is 'Outsourcing'
Outsourcing is a practice used by different companies to reduce costs by transferring portions of
work to outside suppliers rather than completing it internally.

Disadvantages
Outsourcing also has several disadvantages. Signing contracts with other companies may take
time and extra effort from a firm's legal team. Security threats occur if another party has access
to a company's confidential information and then the party suffers a data breach. A lack of
communication between the company and the outsourced provider may occur, which could delay
the completion of projects.

What is Workforce Management

Workforce Management
Workforce Management (WFM) is basically all the activities needed to maintain a productive
workforce, including payments and benefits, human resources planning, training and
development, time-keeping and attendance, recruitment, performance management, and
forecasting and scheduling,
In essence it is about assigning the right employees with the right skills to the right job at the
right time to meet demand while optimising the scheduling of staff.
Recently, the concept of workforce management has begun to evolve into Workforce
Optimisation.
What is Workforce Optimisation?

Workforce optimisation is a relatively new term in the industry. It was coined by analysts who
saw previously disparate software solutions, including quality monitoring, workforce
management, performance management, and eLearning, becoming integrated and enhanced by a
new layer of cross-functionality based on these novel integrations. This convergence was
principally driven by the user community, frustrated by the problems associated with multiple
software applications, interfaces, and databases, unsynchronised vendor software release cycles,
costly yet limited integrations, and the overhead costs of dealing with multiple vendors.
Workforce management solutions

Workforce management solutions now have to deal with environments which are getting much
more complex, in order to satisfy the reality of the work that is being presented to agents. For
example, all agents require good listening ability, familiarity with keyboard and IT skills and a
knowledge of the business they are working in, but more now need a pool of in-depth and
specific talent to be available in order to satisfy customers fully, including:

Familiarity with either specific customers (e.g. account management) or

customer sub-sets (e.g. commercial vs. domestic products)

Specific product or technical knowledge

Right level of experience and empowerment for the customer (e.g. goldcard customers may demand single-call resolution, meaning senior agents
must take the call)

Language skills (both in domestic and international markets)

Ability to deal with multimedia interactions (either in real time such as text
chats or off-line, such as emails)

Similar regional accent to caller (where applicable).

Fulfilling service levels while managing costs is a iterative cycle, requiring several key processes
to be completed. Feedback from each stage means that the enterprise can continually improve its
efficiency and become more confident in future predictions.