A department within a company or a third-party organization that handles telephone sales and/or service. Inbound call centers, which take calls from the outside, use automatic call distributors (ACDs) to route calls to the appropriate agent.
Outbound call centers use "predictive dialers," which make calls from a list, but ensure that a person has answered before switching the call to the next available agent (see
predictive dialer). See
ACD,
cyberagent,
CSR,
zip tone,
Web callback,
cherrypicking,
virtual call center,
blended call center,
Web-enabled call center,
live contact overload,
call center in a box,
agent turnover and
call center overflow.