A Call Centre is a centralised office used for the purpose of sending and receiving large volumes of requests by telephone. Call Centres are operated by companies in order to administer product support to clients or to handle information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing telemarketing calls are made from call centres in order for companies to sell products to potential clients. As well as this, many call centres handle letters, faxes, e-mails and occasionally live internet chat as well.



Often call centres are set up with large open spaces, and each operative has a telephone and headset as well as data information relating to the products the company sells, on a computer, that they can refer to whilst talking to a customer. These days many companies use new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI) to link together the many voice and data pathways into the centre.

Most large businesses use call centres to interact with their clients. These can include utility companies, mail order catalogue retailers, computer hardware and software customer support, and even retail stores who may use a call centre as a place for customers to contact to give feedback on products or to ask questions about specific items. As well as servicing external customers, some companies operate call centres for use by their own staff to enable them to support work related queries and fix computer issues.

There are quite a number of different jobs that take place in call centres including Team Leaders and Managers, Trainers, Call Centre Managers and Directors, and Operatives. Each of these roles will involve various different skills, but overall, a job in a call centre might suit you if you have a good clear speaking voice, and are good at imparting information to people. A background in retail, or customer care may be useful, but is often unnecessary as most of the required skills can be taught. Some companies will offer jobs where you are selling a product and are given a clear indication of what to say to a potential customer, and other companies will require you to undergo training to teach you about specific products that they produce so that you can answer much more in depth questions.

Many people who enjoy working with other people, and helping them will find that they suit this type of environment as well as those who are happy working with a variety of technologies from telephones to computers. It can be a very rewarding job as you may well be able to solve problems for people and make them feel happier about something, but there may also be moments where you will need to be able to keep your cool with an individual too.