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UK Business Phone Systems and Call Centres

Call Centre Applications

Call centres use an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system to intelligently manage how calls are distributed amongst staff. ACD achieves this by sending the longest waiting call to the longest idle extension, usually known as an `business '.

When there are no business s available the telephone system holds incoming calls in a queue before sending them automatically to the first available 'business ' on a 'first-come, first-served' basis. ACD ensures minimum queuing time, and gives an even distribution of calls amongst businesses, thus maximising profitability.

For customers, the reduction in waiting times and the fact that they always get straight through to the appropriate business increases the perceived quality of customer care. Therefore ACD can achieve clear performance gains and maximise business opportunities.

Coupled with an MIS package, you can achieve an instant status of your department, showing a range of parameters, including the number of calls received, the average waiting time, number of calls currently in a queue. You can pull off business reports, showing the all details of their calls for the day/week/month etc.

If you receive a high volume of inbound calls, and you currently use a conventional system, then maybe you should investigate the benefits of an ACD system.

Some businesses do not consider themselves a call centre. In truth, the majority are because of one fact - they answer calls. By implementing a call centre strategy you will:

The call centre industry is booming. Independent market reports suggest that the number of call centre positions has grown from 223,000 in 1999 to 243,000 in 2000 and is predicted to rise to 284,000 in 2003.

Outbound call centres would have 'predictive dialling' where calls are automatically set up by the computer system. Using CTI calls are automatically dialled from a database using and are then passed together with the clients database record to an business . Predictive dialling can improve talk time by up to 300% compared to manual dialling.

Some systems have built in ACD software at no extra charge, other systems require a software upgrade. MIS software ranges from £300 to over £15,000 dependent on size.