Call Centers and Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) - An Overview

A call centre is a facility which is mostly used by companies to provide customer care services. This type of facility used to handle only incoming product support or information inquiries from customers. However nowadays companies use call centre for a variety of activities like marketing, trouble shooting and making outbound service calls to the customers.
One defining feature of call centre is the receiving and dialing of a large volume of telephone calls. Nowadays, with high speed Internet and broadband connections available in most cities, customer care servicing is also done over a variety of web media such as chat and e-mail. Since these service centre handle letters, faxes, and e-mails apart from telephone calls all at one location, they are also known as contact centre.

The physical topography of call centre offices typically consists of wide open workspace dotted with work stations equipped with a computer and a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch. All the work stations are monitored by supervisors who with the help of call centre software can watch the process in real time.

The technological topography can be quite complex as modern call centre handle a variety of communication media such as voice calls, faxes, e-mails and chat. In other words, this throws up the need for a seamless interface to accommodate all of these media.

Moreover the system should be flexible and scalable enough to meet future challenges. In addition to managing all the above mentioned modes of interaction, sometimes call centre is operated or networked with additional centre.

How do call centre manage all these complex tasks with ease and provide customer satisfaction? They have at their disposal an range of software called call centre software which can help managers and agents manage the inbound queries and outbound response and service calls. These software solutions also help the senior management to keep track of performance and productivity.

One of the most important pieces of call centre software is an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) which is discussed in detail below.

An Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) recognizes answers and routes incoming calls to the next available agent. Its scale can range from just a few lines for small operations to hundreds of lines for large applications and campaigns.

The ACD on receiving a call distributes it to an agent or operator, a recorded message (or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system), or puts it on hold until an agent can receive it. This distribution is done on the basis of specific instructions, regarding the handling of the call, received from the caller or the system itself.

ACD systems can also act intelligently by routing the call to the specifically skilled agents or specific IVR menus by filtering the calls on many factors such as the number of the caller, country of origin, agent availability and expertise and time of day.

An example of such capability is that a person calling from France will be directed to the agent who is fluent in French and the IVR menu he/she will encounter will also be in French. This capability goes a long way in satisfying a customer and building up the image of the company as one which takes care of its customers.

An ACD system can be of use to any organization looking to satisfy its customers and other stake holders. Plus, it is also of great importance to customer service centre, inbound service bureaus and government agencies.

Today's ACD systems are far ahead of their predecessors. Digital recording, conferencing, silent observation, agent coaching and outbound call blending are some of the advanced features that modern day ACD systems are equipped with.