A series of events are to be held celebrating the role of call centres and the people who work within them.

International Contact Centre Week will be taking part between September 1st and 8th and was launched last year by Contactcenterworld.com.

Thousands of new call centre jobs are opening up across the country as firms focus on customer service to beat the recession.

There are now an estimated 15,000 new jobs being advertised to add to the 800,000 staff currently being employed by call centres.

Semantic software developed by Expert System and available in the UK through Eclipse Marketing has won the Global Mobile Award, in the category Best Billing or Customer Care Solution. 

Expert System’s COGITO® Answers was described as “a major, smart, automated step forward in how to help users to get information - an excellent way of providing phone help” by the GSMA’s judging panels.

Are companies really aware whether their call centres are operating at maximum productivity levels? Quite often contact centres may have grown from being a small space in a back office with a few desks to a fully operational call centre, but the technology will have remained unchanged. This can lead to outdated systems, all of which can have detrimental effects on corporate image, reputation and ultimately the success of the business.

This is where outsourcing can be a real benefit to organisations wishing to optimise their range of choice and level of customer services.

According to Eclipse’s own James Le Roth writing in utalkmarketing, outsourcing to a third party can also give businesses access to additional customer data, not available by conventional in-house means such as web forms. A skilled contact centre advisor will be able to interact on a more insightful level with callers, capturing the essence of how consumers feel about the brand, whether positive or negative.  

Customer satisfaction is being jeopardised by poor technology in call centres which forces agents to spend the majority of their time on administrative duties.

Call centre operatives are spending an average of 71 per cent of their time entering data, making notes, seeking advice and reading from information screens, according to new research.