First blog postTo define the word “CALL CENTER”, it is an office set up to handle a large volume of telephone calls, especially for taking orders and providing customer service.With the latest technology we had today, the demand also increases, thus, a specific profession was addressed and call center companies was introduced in the business world.
An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. A contact centre is a location for centralized handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.
A call centre has an open work space for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to atelecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.
The contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management.
A contact centre can be defined as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for the customer and organisation. Contact centres, along with call centres and communication centres all fall under a larger umbrella labelled as the contact centre management industry. This is becoming a rapidly growing recruitment sector in itself, as the capabilities of contact centres expand and thus require ever more complex systems and highly skilled operational and management staff.
The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their customer interaction. These centres can be operated by either an in house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres).
HISTORY:
The earliest call centres were created during the 1960s, and were known as “Private Automated Business Exchanges” (PABX). The earliest example of a call centre was in the UK is at the Birmingham Press and Mail. They had a GEC PABX 4 ACD, installed in 1965.
The coining of the term “call centre” is more recent, with the first published use of the term in 1983.
Like many revolutionary technologies, the call centre has a creation myth. This states that call centres as we know them today originate from the Automatic Call Distributor developed in 1973 by US firm Rockwell (the Rockwell Galaxy) to allow Continental Airlines to run a telephone booking system.
As it turns out, this was all good marketing baloney. Rockwell did indeed develop their ACD in 1973 and it was installed that year. But it certainly was not the first.
Rockwell’s claim to the first ACD installation may be inaccurate, but they were certainly amongst the first and most successful manufacturers.
The first call centres
The first ACD systems would probably have emerged in the 1950s to handle central operator enquiries at the main telephone companies. To date we have not been to find any concrete evidence of this so far.
The earliest example of a call centre we can find in the UK is at the The Birmingham Press and Mail. 
They had a GEC PABX 4 ACD, installed in 1965, as seen in the photos. Thanks to the British Telephones website for allowing us to reproduce them.
Already the hallmarks of the call centre can be seen in the rows of agents with individual phone terminals, taking and making calls
The Ericsson PABX ET 4 was a fully automatic Strowger Telephone system with a cordless operator’s console. It superseded the PABX No. 3 and was manufactured by Ericsson Telephones of Beeston, Notts. The ACD system was an adaptation of this PABX ET 4 system.
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA; CALLCENTERHELPER.COM
BUHAYCALLCENTER 