A Call centre is an arrangement where the calls are entertained at massive level, these calls may be inbound or outbound depending upon the particular Call centre.

So we can say that the Call centre is a centralized process of handling the calls. The people who work at call centre and handles the calls, are called Call centre agents.

The most generalized task of a call centre is to provide the appropriate support to the customer queries while telemarketing and debt collection are some of the other tasks done by a call centre.

History :

Several decades ago, the companies of United States were thinking of measures to cut the costs while maintaining contacts with the customers. The same was happening to the companies of United Kingdom, so a concept of clustering the telephonic contacts with customers was devised. According to this concept it was possible to maintain contacts with lot of customers using only a single department.

The Greatest advantage of this newly generated concept was that only a few people were required to handle a big number of calls. In this way the number of people required for handling the telephonic interaction with customers was decreased and hence the profitability & productivity of organization was increased. The concept was followed by other countries and it became very popular in United Kingdom in 1980s.This concept was popularly christened as “Call centre”.

England and Scotland were the countries of UK who performed well on this “call centre” concept in the earlier decades. Now when this concept was successful, it was followed in most of the countries including countries of Europe, Asia and South Africa. India became popular to follow this concept because there were a lot of people available to work on this concept in comparatively lower wages than other countries.

Types of Call Centers :

• Tele-Marketing call centre.
• Web Enabled call center.
• Outbound call center.
• Virtual call center.
• Inbound call center.
• Customer relationship call center.
• Interactive call center.