Contact Center

Contact Centre A contact centre is a facility used by companies to manage all client contact through a variety of mediums such as telephone, fax, letter, e-mail and increasingly, online live chat.[1]

The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their customer interaction. These centres can be operated in two major ways, the first, by having an in house department responsible for the day to day communications with customers, the second to outsource customer interaction to a third party agency.

Contact centres can also offer a number of different services. One of the most popular is the support or help desk, which regularly answers technical questions from customers and assists them using their equipment or software. Frequently, support desks are used by companies in the computing, telecommunications and consumer electronics industries.

Equally important are the customer service contact centres that answer specific queries relating to customer issues, in the banking and utility sectors these are frequently used to answer customer questions relating to their account or payments, this type of service may even be used to respond to customer complaints and undertake retention strategies for dissatisfied customers.

Finally there are contact centres that carry out sales and marketing activities; these can be performed through cold calling strategies and increasingly through live chat applications on company websites.