A contact center or call center is a centralized office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. A contact center is a location for centralized handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.

A call center has an open work space for call center agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional center, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LAN's. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.

The contact center is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact center, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management. The majority of large companies use contact center as a means of managing their customer interaction. These center can be operated by either an in house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third party agency.