How Does A Call Center Work?

Have you ever wondered what happens in the seconds between dialing a number and hearing a human voice? A call center operates like a high-speed digital traffic control system. It combines human skills with advanced routing technology to ensure millions of customers get help every single day.

The Lifecycle of a Call

1. The Routing (ACD): When a customer dials, the call hits an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). This system is the "traffic cop." It looks for an agent who is currently "Available" and has the right skill set (e.g., speaks Spanish or knows Tech Support).
2. The Connection: The call is delivered to the agent’s headset. At the same moment, a "screen pop" usually appears on the agent's computer, displaying the customer's account information.
3. The Interaction: The agent uses a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool -a database software- to view the customer's history and log details about the current conversation.
4. The Resolution: The goal is to solve the issue. Once the call ends, the data is saved, and the agent becomes available for the next person in line.

As we learned in the previous section (How Does a Call Center Work?), a Call Center might have several different clients from different industries, and agents are normally hired to work for a specific client.

It is the goal of the call center to absorb all the knowledge about tools, services, procedures, metrics, and standards, to provide a transparent service to the customers. Think that whenever you call/chat with a company, you don't necessarily know where you're calling to; you should not note if it's a BPO or the company's own call center.

Let's use the example of The Tech Giant and Awesome Service, as in the previous section:

When a customer uses the Contact Us option on The Tech Giant's website, they are routed to an available agent on Awesome Service BPO. The agent, hired by Awesome Service, responds as The Tech Giant's representative: "Thank you for calling The Tech Giant. I'm happy to help you today".

One very important note to add here is that agents are employees of the BPO, not of the client. As the Call Center was the one hiring those agents, all management relies on it, with accountability to the client for the results of those agents.

But agents and clients are only two of the actors. In the next sections, we will learn about the different departments (or verticals) that interact inside a Call Center, and how the process goes until a person becomes a productive agent.