Yes, call centre jobs are going to be sustainaable. Not only the demand from foreigners will remain strong but domestic demand for call centres will be rising very fast soon. There is extreme shortage of workers in call centers. Please get in touch with CII who are organising special awareness and skill test program thought out the country soon.
Now read this if you can make a sense of the requirementy. A call centre or call center is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone.
A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact centre.
A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
Most major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centres. Examples of this include help desks and sales support.A call centre can be viewed, from an operational point of view, as a queueing network. The simplest call centre, consisting of a single type of customers and statistically-identical servers, can be viewed as a single-queue. Queueing theory is a branch of mathematics in which models of such queueing systems have been developed. These models, in turn, are used to support work force planning and management, for example by helping answer the following common staffing-question: given a service-level, as determined by management, what is the least number of telephone agents that is required to achieve it. (Prevalent examples of service levels are: at least 80% of the callers are answered within 20 seconds; or, no more than 3% of the customers hang-up, due to their impatience, before being served.)
Queueing models also provide qualitative insight, for example identifying the circumstances under which economies of scale prevail, namely that a single large call centre is more effective at answering calls than several (distributed) smaller ones; or that cross-selling is beneficial; or that a call centre should be quality-driven or efficiency-driven or, most likely, both Quality and Efficiency Driven (abbreviated to QED). Recently, queueing models have also been used for planning and operating skills-based-routing of calls within a call centre, which entails the analysis of systems with multi-type customers and multi-skilled agents.
Call centre operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queueing, with operations research, which considers a wide range of optimization problems, being very relevant. For example, for forecasting of calls, for determining shift-structures, and even for analyzing customers' impatience while waiting to be served by an agent.Call Centres use a wide variety of different technologies to allow them to manage the large volumes of work that need to be managed by the call centre. These technologies ensure that agents are kept as productive as possible, and that calls are queued and processed as quickly as possible, resulting in good levels of service.
These include ;
ACW (After call work)
ACD (automatic call distribution)
Agent performance analytics
Automated surveys
BTTC (best time to call)/ Outbound call optimization
IVR (interactive voice response)
CTI (computer telephony integration)
Enterprise Campaign Management
Outbound predictive dialer
CRM (customer relationship management)
CIM (customer interaction management) solutions (Also known as 'Unified' solutions)
Email Management
Chat and Web Collaboration
Desktop Scripting Solutions
Outsourcing
Third party verification
TTS (text to speech)
WFM (workforce management)
Virtual queuing
Voice analysis
Voice recognition
Voicemail
VoIP
Speech Analytics
Knowledge Management System
Electronic performance support systems
Many call centres have been built in areas that are depressed economically. This means that the companies get cheap land and labour, and can often benefit from grants to encourage them to improve employment in a given area.
China is investing in English language to make it an attractive location for outsourcing, and local demand as well as Japanese language skills in Dalian help its call center industry grow even without the English language capablilty.
India: A large number of call centres having moved to India, but further movement to India is on a decline as India rapidly absorbs most of the highly educated people in other outsourcing jobs and, like in other countries, call center jobs are increasingly viewed as stopgap jobs rather than as careers.
Malta with its multilingual capabilities, cultural affinity to the UK, low labour costs, European Union membership and mature legal framework is emerging as a popular Nearshore destination for the European market.