History of the Call Center

It happens to just about everyone at least once a day. They call up a business and get sent through automated system that tries to resolve the reason that they have called. No matter how good the automated phone system is, it is often easier to talk to a real person to help you resolve any issues. If you got through the right steps, you will end up connected to a representative of the company that is working at a call center.

The call center can be located anywhere. The business may be in the center of the United States, but when you get in touch with the call center, you may be talking to someone that is located in India. As long as the representative can resolve the reason that you are calling it should not matter where they are located. Computers and all of the information that is available on them allow representatives to do the same things whether they are working in the main corporate office of a business or if they are off in some remote location. Call centers have been an important part of business for a lot longer than people may realize.

Contact Centers

Before businesses turned to companies that offered call center services they had ways to handle it on their own. Instead of having a bank of operators and phone lines that could be used for multiple companies at one time a business had a single person or a small group of individuals that were the first people that customers would contact.
It is a very old idea to have an individual that acts on behalf of someone else so that the other person does not have to deal with issues that are not important to them. The chain of command of businesses and governments is a form of a contact center. If you want something to be fixed you had to talk to the right person. If that person could not resolve it, you would move up the chain until you found someone that could fix it. They did not use phones and computers until much later, but they did represent the original call centers.

Modern Call Centers

The call centers of today have been outsourced to countries where the people answering the phones work for very low wages. They are trained to work as representative of many different companies. They have very specific scripts to follow whenever someone calls so that everyone who calls the company will get similar answers no matter who they call. The modern call center is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so there is always someone there that will try to help you.