Va. That's why today's call center is being asked to do much more than simply field telephone inquiries. The modern call center is being integrated with other IT systems, letting agents cull information from a variety of databases, Web servers, and legacy systems. The modern call center is also becoming a nexus for complex customer interaction, with the ability to respond to customers with whatever form of communication they prefer. And the modern call center is evolving into a knowledge center, a repository of best practices and customer feedback used throughout a company to improve its products and services. It isn't always easy to integrate E-mail, Web chat, and other media and technology into call centers that normally handle only phone calls.
Communications is still at the heart of a call center.
But communications today means more than simply routing phone calls through conventional automatic call-distribution systems. Such systems, at the heart of every call center, are being asked to do more than ever before. At the same time, the system will provide agents with a screen pop of information about the caller. The distributed system is expected to save the airline a substantial, but unspecified, amount of money annually, in part because the company will be able to better utilize staff in smaller call centers that might be idle when other centers are overloaded. When callers dial the American Airlines call center, they are prompted to enter their frequent-flier number.