A Call Center is what you interact with when you call a help line, ("my product is not working properly, can you help me"), an order line ("I'd like to order your CD of the month this month"), or when you get a call from one of those annoying sales people right around dinner time.

In each case, these centers (sometimes referred to as "contact centers" to reflect the added mediums of email and the world wide web) are usually housed within large, modern office buildings filled with "agents" wearing headsets and sitting in front of computer screens. Those agents are regularly trained on the minutia of the product they are selling or helping with, as well as the procedures used to do their job. The training can range from hands on training using the various software and customer database packages, to "roll playing" drills in techniques for dealing with irate customers. Because of this constant learning and testing atmosphere, the people who work in these centers are often of greater than average intelligence.

A relatively new trend in the industry is to refer to these centers as CRM centers (one trade publication recently changed it's name to Call Center CRM Solutions). CRM is an acronym for "Customer Relationship Management" and is used to refer to the broader role of the Call Center. As this name implies, the Call Center is more than customer contacts. It also funnels huge amounts of corporate data into a single location. Information such as customer history databases, links to order fulfillment systems and shipper's systems - even engineering data for product questions - are all typically accessed by Call Center agents in the course of their job.

Early adopters of Call Center technology were "service intensive" industries such as financial services, utilities, and mail-order retail. Perhaps the best-known early user of Call Centers is the "music club" from Tara Haute. Do you remember Columbia House?