Call center
A call center is a department or company that handles a high volume of phone calls for an organization, using teams of agents and specialized routing software. Calls may be inbound (customer service, sales, support) or outbound (sales, collections, surveys).
Also called: call centre, contact center, contact centre
A call center is defined by scale and by the tooling that scale requires: automatic call distribution to route calls to available agents, queues with hold music and position announcements, agent scripts, supervisor monitoring, and reporting on metrics such as answer rate, speed to answer and abandonment rate.
A contact center is the same operation extended to other channels, email, web chat, SMS and social messaging, handled from one desk with one set of queues.
Call centers differ from answering services and receptionists in what they are for. A receptionist is a front door for one business; a call center is a production line for one organization’s volume of customer interactions, in-house or outsourced. The two categories share vocabulary (transfer, whisper, barge, overflow) because the underlying telephony is the same.