What Makes Contact Centers Different from Call Centers?

By CIOReview | Friday, December 27, 2019

In this digital age, customers are looking for instant resolution of their issues and brands that fail to provide a good customer service, lose customers.

Fremont, CA: ‘Contact Centers’ and ‘Call Centers’ are both for customer service as the two involve phone channels. Those are the only two functions both these solutions have in common. While call centers often have a negative reputation, contact centers are a relatively new solution and considered better. A contact center is a customer communications management hub and it provides customer service across multiple channels such as phone, social media, email, and live chat. With the help of contact center software, customer-facing teams handle conversations coming in from all channels on a single platform. On the other hand, a call center is a customer conversations hub which exclusively uses phone channels. A typical call center system handles outbound and inbound phone calls.

Call centers only use phone channel which happens in real-time eating up the agent’s entire bandwidth. To handle peak volume hours, proper staffing is required; however, running a large team is very expensive. On the other hand, contact centers use digital channels such as email, phone, live chat, and social media. Using different channels helps deliver faster solutions and better customer experiences. An agent can handle three or more chat conversations parallelly, and different channels help distribute the load across the team in a better way.

Brands are always looking to predict problems that customer might have and take proactive approach to solve the issue before it escalates. Since contact centers operate in the digital space, they have a proactive approach as compared to a call center. Agents can track signs of frustration such as rage or dead clicks on the website, and they can reach out to customers to offer timely assistance.

A call center only focuses on phone channels, which means that the agents are not aware of the entire customer journey, and even the call center software does not help in this regard. On the contrary, contact centre software has a repository of data aggregated from various channels. By integrating the contact center software with the CRM, the agents get a unified view of the customers. The agents also get a 360-degree view of the customers as all the support channels are plugged into one platform. Agents can also attach a feedback form to identify if the customer had a good experience.

Looking at several factors, contact centers seem better than call centers. However, the selection of a contact center and a call center depends on the businesses' scale, activity, and goals.