The Call Center industry provides a large percent of employment in the United States. There are many classifications of Call Centers and these mainly depend on the kind of service they provide.

A call center is a centralized office that answers incoming telephone calls from customers for the purposes of product support and complaint. These call centers also make outgoing telephone calls to customers that is more commonly known as telemarketing. An office may also respond to letters, faxes, e-mails and similar written correspondence.

The typical call center is usually set-up in a large room or an entire floor of a building, with workstations that include a computer, a telephone set hooked into a large telecom switch and one or more supervisor stations. The call center may be linked to a network of other call centers or a corporations computer networks, including main frames, microcomputers and LANs. The growing voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a new technology called computer telephony integration (CTI)

Businesses invest in a call center to interact with their customers. These include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms and customer care and support for hardware and software. The use of call centers is not limited to this since they can also be used for internal functions of the business like sales support and help desks.

In the UK, call centers have been built in economically depressed areas because of the cheap land and labor. The community benefits from the employment grants and the standard of living they have dramatically uplifted. In recent years, India and the Philippines have been a good alternative in outsourcing call centers. There are an abundant number of college graduates in these countries who can speak English and serve customers in North America. This has led to many media reports of poor telephone connections and operators with insufficient local knowledge to aide in the customers complaint.