Chapter I: Introduction
With the expansion of technologies into all facets of life, call centers shifted away from the traditional application of handling long-distance switching to provide a variety of support services. This increased usage of call centers created a larger user base, which, along with the evolving price drop in required hardware, brought the price of call center establishment and operation down to the point where any organization with a need could acquire the necessary components to create a call center.
While the applications of call centers expanded rapidly since the eighties, the late nineties brought a technology that made call centers cheaper, more efficient, and versatile. Internet telephony dramatically altered the nature of call centers in both the way they operate and the functions they serve.
Today call centers can operate anywhere in the world by routing the calls through the internet. This has not only expanded the ability for centralized call centers to operate in any location with a sufficient amount of bandwidth, but the explosion of consumer subscriptions to broadband connections allow call centers to decentralize operations by utilizing agents wherever they may be located, independent of where the call center is located.
