Building brand image and securing customer loyalty have become primary objectives of corporates worldwide. Competitive business environment and increased customer awareness has forced business houses to be more proactive in adopting a customer centric approach. Call Center is a primary channel of contact between the business houses and its customers, especially in the service sector. The "Enquiry Services" of the railways, airways and telcos are some of the examples of traditional call center applications. Over the recent years, banks and insurance companies have built more sophisticated call centers for catering to a large customer base. The call center industry is growing rapidly worldwide. Today, there are agencies that specialize in providing call center services for one or several business houses. Though the traditional base of call center is in the developed countries, it is spreading its wings in developing countries as well.

What is a Call Center?
A Call Center is a centralised place, where a customer can contact for receiving any information about the products or services of a company. In its simplest form, it consists of an agent of the business house equipped with a telephone. The telephone number is widely publicised so that any customer can call the agent for seeking assistance. However, just one agent is not sufficient for a very large customer base. Besides, with increasing complexity of services in the modern social system, it is not possible for a single human being to provide satisfactory answer to a customer query. A modern call center employs several specialised groups of agents to answer questions related to the different products or services. For example, the call center for a bank might employ agents specialising in accounts, credit cards, loans and other services/products that a bank might provide to its customers. Some banks even go a step further to provide more personalised call center services to privileged customers.

The role of IT in Call Center
Some of the important parameters to measure the quality of services of a Call Center are the proportion of queries answered to users satisfaction, the delay in answering the query, the waiting time of the customer and the number of missed calls. These parameters are usually interlinked. A more satisfactory answer may need a longer analysis on the part of the agent, resulting in delayed response and possibly lost calls. Improving the quality parameters of a Call Center generally implies more investments in terms of added hardware and operating staff. A modern call center leverages the Information Technology to provide better and faster services to the customers at a lower operating cost. A few of the techniques are described below.

-- Pre-recorded announcements concerning routine information, such as current bank interest rates, delays in train/flight schedules, etc. can reach several customers at a relatively lower cost. However, the impersonal services may lead to customer dissatisfaction because of longer waiting time.

-- Speech synthesis technology helps in automated but personalised answering of routine queries by extracting relevant data from the corporate databases.

-- Online information databases aid the agents in quickly recalling the information about the customers and the products / services. This results in faster and more accurate answers to the queries.

-- Calling Line Identification (CLI) and Automated Voice Recognition (AVR) technologies help in identifying the calling customer. These technologies can be used to avoid elaborate procedures of validating the identity of the caller with PIN number and "secret questions". This not only economises time but also reduces hassles leading to customer satisfaction.

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