Job Positions in call center and Descriptions
What is a call center?
A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. A contact centre is a location for centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.
A call centre has an open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom 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 organization.[2] 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).
Job Positions in call center and Descriptions:
Agents (workers) can be inbound or outbound:
Inbound Agent: This means you as an agent will receive calls and answer them.
Outbound Agent: This means you are the one who would call customers or clients.
There are several types of specializations:
Customer Service Representatives address customer or client queries regarding the service or the product they represent.
Technical Support Representatives address customer or client queries about the technical aspect of a product or a service they represent.
Sales Representatives offers products or services to clients or potential customers. Basically, they sell stuff.
Collections Representatives collect payments or unpaid balances from clients or customers from the product or service provided by the company.
Chat/Email Support (non-voice) Representatives address customer or client queries through chat or e-mail.
What is the difference between CSR and TSR?
In the call center industry, customer service is the most common service provided by the agents. Customer service essentially pertains to the provision of all types of service to clients of another company before, during and after a purchase of a product or service from the call center’s account. This service is comprised by different activities designed to increase the customer satisfaction particularly to address or meet customere xpectation.
The term CSR (customer service representative) and TSR (technical support representative) are fundamentally encompassed under the umbrella concept of customer service. The major difference between the two is the type of customer service provided. CSR pertains to agents who usually provide support and assistance to customers in correct use and optimizing a product. This includes assistance in setting up, installation, fixing, maintenance and disposal of a product. CSR also pertains to agents that handle services like answering customer queries, taking orders, scheduling deliveries, confirming and following up orders, among many others.
TSR on the other hand refers to agents that provides technical support to products or services. This is especially applies to technology products such as cellular phones, computers, internet connection (ISP), software products and other electronic or mechanical commodities. The support provided by TSR like using or installing software application or trouble shooting one’s internet connection are essentially technical in nature.
