1823 Call Centre

1823 is a 24x7 one-stop hotline services operated by the Government of Hong Kong. It answers public enquires on behalf of more than 20 participating departments and receives public complaints against the Government. It also act as a platform for resolving cross-departmental complaints. For enquiries regarding Departments not covered by 1823, the Call Centre can provide relevant contact information. Public enquiries or complaints can be made by phone, fax, SMS, email, online, or post.

History

1823 was launched by the Efficiency Unit of the Government Secretariat in July 2001 and became fully operational in October 2002. It aims as a replacement of telephone hotlines, fax numbers, email and other addresses operated by various government departments. In 2009, the Centre answered over 2.4 million calls. Over 16.5 million calls have been answered in ten years time.

References

Call centre

A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre 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 centre is a location for centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.

A call centre has an open workspace for call centre 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 centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.