Call center

In the United Kingdom, a Call centre is a popular term for a centralised office of a company that takes incoming calls from customers. Owing to the size of companies and their customer bases, these offices are often very large, such as converted warehouses.

The centralised approach aims to rationalise the company's operations and reduce costs, whilst producing a standard, branded, front to the world. The approach naturally lends itself to large companies with a large, distributed customer base. Examples include utility companies, and mail order catalogue firms.

Call centres have been aided by a range of computer technologies, including computer telephony integration CTI?, which allows the actions of the computer to be synchronised with what is happening on the phone. In addition, early customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, such as Siebel, and other database systems, were heavily employed in call centres.

Call centres have their critics as well. Some critics argue that the work atmosphere in such an environment is de-humanising. Others point to the low rates of pay and restrictive working practices of some employers. There has been much controversy over such things as restricting the amount of time that an employee can spend in the toilet.

Owing to the highly technological nature of the operations in such offices, the close monitoring of staff activities is easy and widespread. This can be argued to be beneficial, to enable the company to better plan the workload and time of its employees. Some people have argued that such close monitoring breaches human rights to privacy.

Many call centres in the UK have been built in areas that are depressed economically. This means that the companies get cheap land and labour, and can often benefit from grants to encourage them to improve employment in a given area.