Glossary

What is Contact Center?

The contact center is a separate division of an organization that is responsible for conducting interactions with the customer, clients, suppliers, and any stakeholder of the company. Contact centers have been in play for the past 2 decades. The emergence of contact centers came into the picture when customer-oriented companies were not able to handle their customer queries when they go in large numbers.

Types of Contact Center:

Inbound
Outbound
Omnichannel
Multichannel
Cloud

Difference between Contact Center and Call Center:

Aspect	Contact Center	Call Center
Communication Channels	Offers multiple channels (phone, email, chat, social media, etc.)	Primarily focuses on handling inbound and outbound calls
Customer Interaction	Handles various forms of customer interactions beyond phone calls, such as emails, chats, social media messages, etc.	Primarily deals with voice-based interactions through phone calls
Customer Experience	Provides a more diverse and omnichannel experience, allowing customers to choose their preferred communication channel	Mainly focuses on resolving issues through phone calls, potentially limiting customer options
Technology Integration	Often integrates with CRM systems, ticketing platforms, and other tools to manage customer interactions across multiple channels	May utilize basic telephony systems or call center software tailored mainly for voice calls
Scope	Supports broader customer engagement and service delivery strategies, including customer support, sales, marketing, etc.	Typically focused on handling customer service inquiries and issue resolution
Workforce Skills	Agents need to be proficient in handling various communication channels and may require additional training	Agents primarily need strong verbal communication skills and may require less training on other communication channels
Flexibility	Offers greater flexibility in terms of communication channels and working hours	Tends to have a more rigid structure, focusing mainly on traditional call handling during specific hours

What are Contact Center Services?

Contact center services refer to the range of support and communication solutions provided by businesses to interact with customers. These services are primarily designed to manage inbound and outbound communications across various channels such as phone calls, emails, chat, social media, and more. Contact centers play a crucial role in ensuring effective customer service, sales, technical support, and other interactions. Some common contact center services include:

Inbound Customer Support
Outbound Sales and Marketing
Technical Support
Order Processing and Fulfillment
Customer Feedback and Surveys
Multichannel Communication
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems
Quality Assurance and Monitoring
CRM Integration
24/7 Support

There are two ways of establishing a contact center - either you can build an in-house contact center, and manage the entire operation by yourself, or you can hire a third-party company to take up the responsibility of handling all the customer queries effectively. There are two types of calls taking place in a call center - inbound and outbound. A contact center provides services for both types of calls or either one of the call types.

Customer-centric companies are highly dependent on contact centers for leading high-quality conversations with customers. Customers form the basis of all service-based and product-based organizations. Therefore, customer experience and satisfaction are top priorities for these companies.
Having an in-house contact center can be quite tedious and it is a never-ending process. In order to focus on the core business activities, companies outsource the contact center department to a third-party company that can not only handle the customer-handling responsibilities but also does a good job of it.
People usually have a misconception that call centers and contact centers are the same, however, that is not entirely true. Well, both of the entities are responsible for leading communications with the customers and clients, but there is a difference.
A call center is limited to providing assistance over the call but a contact center may provide support over different channels such as email, SMS, chat, and call.
It is important to entertain all the product or service-related queries of the customer but it is more important to conversate with the customers with absolute dignity and diligence. Contact centers are not only responsible for customer acquisition, but they are also responsible for customer retention.
If we are talking about outbound contact center service, it would most probably be used for running sales and marketing operations. Agents from these companies contact the customers to share valuable product/service offers and try to convert the customers.
In inbound call center service, customers call the company for sharing their grievances and concern about the product or service they recently rendered. Any dispute or problem raised by the customer must be resolved at the quickest possible time. It shows the efficiency of the contact centers and contact centers are representatives of the client company.
Contact centers are direct contributors of income for the client company. A slight irregularity in customer service can cost a lot of capital the company. So, these contact centers work in the most conscientious manner to ensure the best customer service and conversion of sales.

Conclusions: As opposed to conventional call center services, contact centers offer omnichannel communication support, where you can offer your customers or clients multiple ways to communicate their inquiries, concerns, and grievances. The agenda of offering omnichannel customer support is to increase customer satisfaction. When customers are provided with the convenience to contact through multiple channels, it directly creates a good rapport between the customers and the client company.

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What is Contact Center?

Types of Contact Center:

Difference between Contact Center and Call Center:

What are Contact Center Services?

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What is Contact Center?

Types of Contact Center:

Difference between Contact Center and Call Center:

What are Contact Center Services?

Related Questions

Resource Library

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BSNL Augmented Business Performances with Go4customer

Getit infomedia optimized business performance with Go4customer.com

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Can AI Contact Centers Really Understand Your Customers Needs?

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Go4customer