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A call center is a business or organizational facility where calls are taken and calls are made. Think of the pledge breaks on your local public television station. When people call to make pledges, an ACD (automatic call distribution) system routes those calls to an available representative. The caller may be put in a queue listening to music (and grumbling the whole time).

RFC 2458 (Toward the PSTN/Internet Inter-Networking-Pre-PINT Implementations, November 1998) provides an official description of a call center. See section 11.2, "Call Center Features."

Other call center examples include credit card authorization facilities, airline reservation systems, and customer service centers for large retail establishments. A common theme is customer service, usually 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A call center may also be called a "customer contact center," a "customer care center," a "customer service center," or a "technical support center."