Industries

Any industry that seeks to interact with customers via the telephone can benefit from a call center, so here
we have a few examples of industries:

 Airlines - Customers call airline free numbers to engage with interactive voice response (IVR)
menus or to speak to customer service agents. Customers can check flight status, obtain flight
details and more. In addition, flyers can speak to customer service agents to re-schedule a flight if
in need. When weather conditions, such as a large winter storm, cause flight delays or
cancellations, it’s critical that airlines provide quick response to customers’ needs.
 Healthcare - Customers call healthcare providers to make appointments, change or confirm
appointments and to ask questions to physicians. When a medical emergency arises during off-
hours, healthcare providers can use outsourced call centers to receive calls, then route the calls to
an on-call physician.
 Hospitality - Many large hospitality and tourism companies such as the Hilton Hotels
Corporation for example make use of call centres to manage reservations. These are known in the
industry as "central reservations offices". Staff members at these call centres take calls from
clients wishing to make reservations or other questions via a public number, usually a 1-800
number (which means a free number). These centres may operate as many as 24 hours per day,
seven days a week, depending on the call volume the chain receives.
 Retail - Customers call retail businesses for assistance before, during or after purchase. Before or
during purchase, customers may ask a customer service agent about shipping details or the
retailer’s return policy. After a purchase, customers may call to report a missing item or request a
return.
 Technical – Technical support representatives answer incoming phone calls and troubleshoot
customer tech problems with computer software and hardware. Customers call to ask for support,
guidance or commonly met problems like fixing bugs or others.
 Telemarketing - Businesses can contract telemarketing call centers, like other types of Call
Center, to perform certain tasks that require considerable time, effort, and interaction with clients
or consumers. Businesses and organizations can contract telemarketing call centers to sell their
product, conduct market research, conduct surveys or solicit donations. Telemarketing uses
different strategies to make sales, the main being cold calling. Cold calling involves unsolicited
telephone contact with consumers. Other techniques include persuasion and high pressure to
convince a potential customer to buy products or services.

1. Inbound call centres - As the name implies, these call centers are set up to receive calls
from common public. The most common example of such call centers is a customer
service call center. Call centres agents handle question or problems from current and
potential customers related to product or service, technical support, accounts
management, scheduling, complaints or other problems. Inbound call centres are mostly
common among the retail, technical, helathcare and airlines industries.

2. Outbound call centers – Call centre agents make calls to current or potential customers
on behalf of a business or client. The calls may be for telemarketing, sales, fundraising,
scheduling, surveying or other purposes. This type of call center is mainly used for sales,
promotions and customer surveys, but it’s not always the case. Some businesses choose
to welcome their new clients with the so-called welcome call, during which agents
provide further information on the company’s products or policies. This most commonly
 found in the telemarketing industry and even telephone companies who call customers to
ask for feedback for that specific company.

3. Blended call centres – A blended call centre is equipped to handle both incoming and
outgoing calls, allowing agents to make and receive calls as demand and strategy dictate.
This one is found especially in the hospitality and telemarketing industry.

Beyond inbound, outbound and blended, there are further classifications of call centers:

1. In-house call center: The company owns and runs its own call center and hires its
own agents. This means that the company’s team takes care of the installation,
configuration and maintenance with in-house software and hardware, found
especially in the technical call centres, retail, telemarketing and airlines.

2. Outsourced call centers: The company hires a third party to handle calls on its
behalf, generally to reduce operating costs by removing the burden of hiring and
training call center agents and investing in and updating call center technology. I
think in this case, the hospitality and healthcare industries are the ones who use most
this type of call centres, as they are usually too busy to deal with customers
themselves.

3. Offshore call center: A company has outsourced its call center operations to an
organization in another country, often to save money on wages and provide services
around the clock. Drawbacks to an offshore call center can include reduced customer
satisfaction due to language issues and a lack of knowledge about the company,
product or service due to distance.

4. Virtual call center: Agents are geographically dispersed and answer calls utilizing
cloud call center technology. Call center agents can be located either in smaller
groupings in different offices or in their own homes. This may be used for economy
of space.

Skills and requirements for each industry

As call canter workers spend most of their day talking to people, they need superior
written and verbal communication skills. They should also find a balance between
being approachable and being a credible source of information so they have to be at
the same time both conversational and professional. They should to be easy to talk to
people, patience, friendly and understanding, sometimes detailed oriented, adaptable,
and have always have a positive attitude. They need of course to have knowledge in
that respective domain to be able to perform their duty properly and maybe even
organizational skills and a deep knowledge of the company’s products and services.

In the airlines industry for example, the employees should have a great sense of
empathy to be able deal with everyone’s problems as well as adaptability to different
situations they may encounter. In healthcare the workers need to extremely
perceptive to the information given and be very careful when offering help for if not
careful they may cause an even worse outcome. In the hospitality industry works
should be very friendly and communicative and pay much attention to the
customers’ needs while in technical, retail and telemarketing they need special
attention to detail and a great knowledge of what the company is offering so they are
able to provide the need information or solution to the customer’s problem. For the
telemarketing companies employees should also be quite bold people in the case of
outbound call centres so they can advertise and promote their products well.