Call Center vs Contact Center, What's the Difference?

What’s a Call Center?

A call center is a centralized office that manages the inbound and outbound call traffic of a given business by means of a PBX phone system, a series of agents, an ACD application, and a predictive dialer. It is capable of handling a large volume of concurrent calls by queuing callers and servicing them on a first-in, first-out basis. 

What’s a Contact Center?

A contact center is similar to a call center, except it interacts with customers over a larger number of channels. This means that, in addition to making and receiving calls, it branches out into other means like email, chat, social networks, etc. 

Call centers all around the world have experienced a phenomenal growth thanks to information technologies and the low costs involved in data transmission. This is why multiple companies consider it profitable to outsource their customer service and sales operation to these centers. 

What’s the Difference Between Call and Contact Centers? 

Although both terms are interchangeable, the difference lies in the type of services offered by each center. 

A traditional call center uses inbound and outbound calls to sell products, conduct after-sales surveys, solve help desk tickets, offer tech support, etc. 

Contact centers are the evolution of call centers as they provide customer services tailored to the digital era. They manage and meet companies’ communication needs while delivering improved experiences to customers and users alike.  

What Are the Pros of Each of These Centers?

Traditional call centers can help a company ease its daily workload and focus on monitoring and running core operations by taking charge of its phone services, like customer assistance, help desk, tech support, etc.

Contact centers, on the other hand, cover everything. They’re an excellent option for companies with a large volume of ordinary and electronic mail, customer interactions, and (both inbound and outbound) calls because they ensure a first-rate service across all channels. 

Why Are These Two Terms Interchanged or Confused?

Most contact centers are highly scalable. That’s why big companies decide to outsource their phone-based and multi-channel customer communications management to them. Call centers, however, are limited to their experience in managing and distributing calls. This means that all contact centers are call centers, but not the other way around. 

It is a common belief that call centers are a synonym for contact centers, but, as explained before, they can differ from each other depending on the channels they use to assist customers or users. 

To learn more about the newest contact center trends, take a look at the article Contact Centers and Digital Customer Experience. 

Call Center vs Contact Center, What's the Difference?

How Can Contact Centers Improve Multichannel Customer Service?

The Internet never ceases to evolve, just as the possibility that customers contact companies at any given time of the day or night is never ruled out. Real-time assistance is a crucial factor in customer satisfaction rates. Therefore, it proves necessary to provide immediate service over new online channels so as to build good customer relationships. Modern contact centers manage and strengthen said relationships according to the targets of each company through specialized contact center software

Discover what contact center software is and how it works with this video.

CenterWare Xion X5: The Contact Center Evolution 

The breakthroughs in telephony and data technologies are encouraging call centers that rely on a single communication means to evolve into multichannel contact centers. It consequently leads to a revolution in the interactions between customers and companies. 

The difficulties entailed in the management of multiple communication channels demand for even more changes in contact centers. The challenge they face is to devise smart systems for meeting customer expectations through successful interactions while streamlining their operation.  

CenterWare Xion X5 is a contact center software platform engineered with the most advanced technology that integrates voice with data and consolidates multiple communication channels to handle customer interactions consistently and cohesively. It features user-friendly interfaces that enable to create campaigns in quick, simple steps, and service customers through calls, chat, email, and social networks. Its innovative functionalities like call scripting, surveys, IVR, CRM, call blending, and call/screen recording allow to deliver an exceedingly good customer experience. 

Download this free material and learn how to boost agent productivity.

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2 Responses

  1. Hello my friend! I wish to say that this article is awesome, nice written and come with almost all vital infos. I would like to see extra posts like this .

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