A call center is a term for a place that traditionally is considered an office environment where large amounts of calls by phone regarding one subject are either made or answered to.

There are two types of call centers. Inbound, which are used for a company’s inquires and outbound in which there are telemarketers who try to sell a product or service or collect information for research. The requirements a call center may have depends on the company using the service. A large company may opt to have their own physical call center with call center agents. In this capacity, each agent has their own work station.

Workloads of each call center agent depend not only on their capacity to complete each call, but to complete it with quality, ensuring the customer is satisfied. All questions that the customer has should be answered. If it is a sales call, the agent should be able to effectively sell the product or service to the customer, and do so in mass. Scheduling of the calls themselves are done so in a similar fashion.

The schedule is complied in a way that is based on who is the most effective person to either respond to the call or sell the specific product or service. There may be different areas and levels of this. For example, there could be a customer service section and a technical support section for inbound calls for a business.

For outbound calls, there may be different levels in a sales department, separate areas of sale that represent different levels; lowest level could be the telemarketer, then the supervisor, and finally the manager. Higher levels would take the more important calls.

If an ERP system is used for a call center, statistical data would determine who gets what calls. So if the call center agent had really good sales, they may in turn become a supervisor or manager of the outbound call center. If it was an inbound call center, statistical data would show how often a question or inquiry was answered by each agent, thereby determining how effective they are at answering questions on each specified topic. That would then determine if they were suited better for either customer service, technical support, or both.

Corresponding features of ERP to the call centers requirements in this way, determine the workload of each agent, and in what fashion. VoIP could be also monitored to distinguish to management exactly how the successful calls went for training and research.

Helpdesks could also be determined in a similar way to call centers in that the statistical data could show the overall satisfaction of each customer who had to interact with the helpdesk, so by utilizing ERP in this way, call centers would be more functional and effective.

Selection of each agent strategically done. It would be a calculation based on pure numbers and not on personal preference by management. This is why ERP is a good choice for all call centers.