Today's changing call centre: An overview
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Natalie Calvert is a recognised leading authority on call and contact centres — her wealth of experience has been developed over the past 18 years. During this time she has set up and developed a vast range of customer communication and management centres, trained and handled her own extensive teams and spearheaded initiatives in the outsource environment. An impressive range of organisations in the UK, Europe and Asia have benefited from her pragmatic, result-orientated solutions which integrate people, technology and processes to deliver business strategy and objectives. In 1992 Natalie established Calcom Group which is an independent provider of call and contact centre consultancy and training services. A highly respected and award-winning company, Calcom Group specialises in transforming in-house call centres — including customer services, marketing and sales centres. Clients include Xerox, Compaq, Cisco, Open University, London Electricity and NatWest. Natalie chairs London’s Call Centre Taskforce. Natalie is often asked to lecture at major industry events throughout Europe and frequently publishes articles. She is also the UK Ambassador for the European Union/FEDMA project to harmonise contact centre qualifications across Europe for representatives, team leaders and managers. Additionally, she is currently writing a book on contact centre management.
Abstract Are today’s call centres dying? After the alarmists that claim that all call centres are ‘sweatshops’ we now have the assassins that claim that call centres are no longer necessary as the world wide web has taken over. The author examines the growth of the call centre sector and how it is evolving into Customer Contact Centres — a central point of communication to truly manage customer relationships — which is here to stay.
MARKET TRENDS FOR CALL AND CONTACT CENTRES The UK call centre market has grown phenomenally over the past decade. This is demonstrated in the graph in Figure 1.1 The UK is also the leading European country for call and contact centre activity, as shown in Figure 2.2 This phenomenal rise in the use of the telephone as a contact medium has been due to four main factors:
Natalie Calvert Chief Executive, Calcom Group Limited, Heston Court, Camp Road, London SW19 4UW, UK. Tel: 020 8944 9669 e-mail: nataliec@ calcomgroup.com www.calcomgroup.com
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— customers: rise in consumer expectations — technology: availability and development of new technologies — competition: globalisation of markets — financial: drive for efficiency, increased productivity and greater accountability for return on investment (ROI).
Journal of Database Marketing
Vol. 8, 2, 168–175
In 1980, The Times commented that ‘the most powerful marketing tool ever invented lies unused on desks up and down the country’ and to a large extent this remained true for most of the subsequent decade. In the mid-1980s there was a noticeable trend among companies who had tested the telephone successfully through agencies to set up their own operations. The driving factor in these ea
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