ABSTRACT
This book is for anyone who works in a call center. For anyone who sells by phone. Or who helps customers. It's about everything you'll need to make your call center run — and run better.
A call center is traditionally defined as a physical location where calls are placed, or received, in high volume for the purpose of sales, marketing, customer service, telemarketing, technical support or other specialized business activity. One early definition described a call center as a place of doing business by phone that combined a centralized database with an automatic call distribution system. That's close, but it's more than that:
• Huge telemarketing centers • Fundraising and collections organizations • Help desks, both internal and external • Outsourcers (better known as service bureaus) that use their
large capacity to serve lots of companies Estimates of the number of call centers in North America range
from 20,000 to as high as 200,000. The reality is probably somewhere around 70,000 to 90,000 depending on what you consider a call center. Some experts believe that you shouldn't count centers below a certain number of agents (or "seats"). I believe in the widest possible definition, all the way down to micro-centers of four or five people. Why? Because those centers face many of the same kinds of problems on a daily basis as their larger cousins: problems of training, staffing, call handling, technology assessment, and so on. Those smaller centers have to put the same kind of face forward to the customer as the largest centers, in order to remain competitive. And more often than not, those small center become medium-sized centers over time.
