When you are trying to improve your customer service and your customer experience you might look for outsourced options. When you are considering outsourcing partners for your business you might think that you need a call center, or you might have heard of a contact center and you could be interested to know the difference.
Seeking a better customer experience shows that your business is doing well, attracting visitors, and expanding, you are doing right by your customers. Finding a good contact centre could make all the difference to the next stage of growth.
There are some differences between a contact centre and a call center which might help you to decide which route to take and which is more suitable for the kind of customers that you have. There are omnichannel contact centre solutions that might best fit your business now and in the future. There are call centers that might support your customers and satisfy your needs. It is best to be aware and prepared to make the investment in the right direction for you and your customers.
Quick guide to the differences between call center and contact centre
A call center offers the following:
- Voice calls
- Call reports
- Call metrics
- Voice focused customer service and experience
- Focuses on Voice
A contact centre offers the following:
- Voice, email, Live chat, Messaging, FAQ pages, Website solutions, online demos and SMS.
- Multichannel communication and analysis
- Enhanced customer engagement
- Connected customer communication channels
- Future communication and media options
So, if you are looking for a voice solution, a call center is a good option. A call center helps to focus on voice and manage your call flow patterns. If your customers only make phone calls to you and do not choose other communication mediums, a call center is a good fit. If you do a lot of outbound calling, sales calls and your customer interactions are over the phone, a call center is for you. It limits you to voice calls and telephone interactions.
If you have customers that like different channels of communication, then a contact centre could be better. If you like to monitor all channels for communication, to see which one is best, a contact centre could be the answer. If you like to try different marketing strategies and use different routes to market, a contact centre can support that. If you are growing, and expanding, a contact centre will grow with you and support more customers.
Let’s review what a contact centre is in more detail to see if the benefits suit your business.
What is a contact centre?
The simple and concise definition of a contact centre is “A business operational function dedicated to and responsible for communicating with customers.”
If you can think of ways that customers contact you, these can all be managed through a contact centre. Customers might send an SMS, write an email, or complete a contact sheet on your website, these functions are managed by a contact centre.
Your clients might like to speak to you on the phone, send an SMS, use messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram or Facebook or use Live Chat embedded on your site. These are all managed by a good contact centre.
Your clients and prospects could enjoy visiting your site, receiving demos of your product and services, and having detailed discussions with sales representatives through video or online services, this is another amazing function of a good contact centre.
A contact centre covers all types of contact and all channels for communication. The contact centre is usually inside an office with teams working together to support the communication with clients across all platforms. The contact centre usually has a detailed CRM solution where it stores all communication for all customers and has all communication channels integrated for easy recording.
During the Pandemic a lot of contact centre staff chose to work from home. Businesses also offered a Hybrid style of working, with some days in the office and other days at home. Businesses in the Philippines and in many overseas calling facilities, offer contact centre staff the choice to work from home, or from the office, or a mix.
Contact centre software like telephony solutions and CRM systems are used by the teams to help communicate with clients and within the internal teams. This software can be very detailed technology and could be bespoke to that business or could be a bought in model that many contact centre teams use.
A contact centre covers all types of communication, including but not limited to calls, emails, video chats, live chat, messaging, social media messaging, posting and commenting, chatbot services, text messages, and online demonstrations. Some contact centre also use You tube and video messaging, and some help to build websites with detailed FAQ pages for customers to read and look after themselves.
A call center only uses phones.
A contact centre has a detailed process for compliance, and uses good technology for communication, reporting, analysis, and training the staff. The staff must be skilled in multiple types of communication and fluent in at least one language. The CRM solutions used by contact centre team members is detailed and gathers every touch point of data from the customer. This can be used to plan and forecast, and to get to know the customers even better.
Reports are required from contact centre managers, so the teams know what they have done well, and what they can improve on. These reports are often system generated and always analysed by compliance teams and training managers.
Do you know what a Call Center is?
The traditional call center is not like the modern-day contact centre. A call center simply answers the phone and makes out-bound calls. Outbound calling is often completed through an automatic dialing system so the agents spend more time on the phone than they do dialing numbers.
The call center looks like a long row of people sitting at their station making and receiving calls, through their headsets and usually through VoIP calls on their computer. The internet powers the communication for the high volume of calls coming in and the speed at which they must be answered and resolved.
A call centre is voice only. This is very different to a contact centre. If you go to one you will hear a lot of people, talking all at once, usually following the same scripted processes, and often with team leaders and trainers on the floor monitoring the calls and productivity.
Call centers have IVR routing on their phone solutions so customers are guided to the right agent, or the correct team for their call to be resolved. Most call center software solutions have IVR processes and call distribution technology to ensure that calls are distributed evenly, and people are off the phone for as little time as possible.
Calls are recorded, monitored by compliance and training teams and scored based on the scripted processes being followed and the compliance check lists being accomplished. Top scoring call center agents win prizes, get promoted and earn more money through their skills with their voice only communication.
With purely voice communication, the jobs can be monotonous for agents saying the same thing on repeat. A contact centre uses different channels of communication making the job more diverse and challenging.
In a call center customers other forms of communication are not noted so messages can be lost, customers need to repeat themselves and the agents can not help them as quickly, as they could do if they could see all communication.
There is some amazing technology in the purely voice related field of call centers which can keep teams motivated and keep customers engaged.
Using the Interactive voice response system, otherwise knowns as the IVR, customers can hear latest offers, updates, and discounts. They know where they are in the queue and expectations can be managed.
There is a lot of automation in call centers such as auto-dialing, auto-attendants, call recording, status updates, whispers, call queuing, and call diverting. These processes speed up the agent’s ability to support customers and reduce the complaints.
How different is a call center to a contact centre?
To the untrained eye, they are very similar and often used interchangeably by people discussing the outsourcing industry. As you will have read above, the main difference is the communication channels used and the focus on different mediums of communication.
Call centers handle calls. A contact centre handles communication in all forms.
When you are working in a contact centre, you must be skilled in writing, reading, speaking, and listening. You must also be fluent in the languages and the communication techniques being used.
If you are working in a call center as long as you can speak, and listen, and respond properly, your reading and writing skills are less important. Notes need to be left after calls, but could be in the home language, or in note form, with spelling and grammar errors. You can not make a spelling mistake or a grammatical error in a contact centre.
The customer experience from a contact centre is more diverse and offers multiple channels of communication for customers. There is detailed automation, in depth analysis, and the general workforce skills are more diverse.
Both a call center and a contact centre are made for high volume calling and high-volume customer contact rates, and both are often staffed by a high volume of workers. Both have rows of cubicles or desks with agents sitting in front of a computer screen working with customers, but the contact centre has multiple screens open for all the different forms of communication that the agents manage.
Call Centers only handle calls
Working in a contact centre means that you can handle different communication channels. Working in a call center means that you are good on the phone. If your customers speak to you on the phone, and only that form of communication, and you have no intention of expanding your business communication to other mediums, a call center will work well. If you want to try other forms of communication, you need a contact centre.
Call Center agents are the first line of support and of defense for your company. If a customer has a complaint, they will speak to the call center agent, and it will be escalated. In a contact centre the customer might send a text or email first, thereby reducing the stress in their voice and conveying the message clearly.
If your agents only handle calls, they can not see these text messages, emails, or other forms of communication so customers repeat themselves and can get more aggravated.
Complaints are easier to handle if there are several ways of communicating with customers. Safety of the customer and the agent are protected if there are quick responses and speedy resolutions.
Sales are easier to convert if there are multiple channels of communication open.
Customer service is of a higher standard if pictures, videos, written, and voice communication is available.
Disjointed communication
Can you imagine the situation? A customer sends an email, they wait for the reply, it could be a complaint email, or a request for more information. The customer has taken the time to write, think what to write, and send the email in to customer support in a call center. No reply.
After a while, the customer calls the call center, asking why there has been no reply to their email, and their issue remains unresolved. The call center agent does not know anything about this email, because all they do is answer calls.
The customer must be put on hold, and transferred to the email team, or the email team must forward the email to the call center agent for resolution.
Imagine how frustrating that can be for the customer.
Now visualize the same situation in a contact centre. The customer writes the email, and it is responded to quickly, the customer calls the contact centre and they know all about the email and the response and the call is resolved quickly, by the same person, without any escalation of complaint.
Which is better?
One offers a disjointed customer experience which can be longer than needed.
The other offers smooth and fast resolution to issues that come up every day.
Do you want to expand?
Working with a call center your options are limited. Working with a contact centre you can expand your marketing, customer support, and sales strategies.
If your customers today like to speak to you, what about your customers tomorrow, or next year? Are they going to speak to you, or will they prefer to text? Your customers in the future might want to chat through messaging apps and live chat, especially if they are busy and have quick questions. Working with a call center limits the ability to expand communication channels.
Working with a call center means that you train your teams to speak and listen. If you need to move to a contact centre you must retrain your staff. Starting in a contact centre means that your staff are already trained for voice, as well as everything else used in communication.
As technology advances, so do customer expectations. They want to be able to watch a video, discuss it with a competent agent, whilst also chatting and taking notes. They want to be able to send quick messages through social media to discuss products or to speak to other customers.
Successful businesses leverage customer engagement groups and create a community around their product and services. Working with a contact centre means that social media and multi-channel communication is readily available, and the community can start to speak.
With the growth of different social platforms and new platforms being created all the time, don’t you need to be diverse and responsive to the needs of your growing customer base?
In life, do you call, or contact?
When you are speaking to friends and family, you might talk on the phone, but you will send text messages, pictures, videos, voice messages, written, and visual communication, as well as the verbal. If business mirrors life, then a contact centre covers all the forms of communication that happen in everyday communication.
A contact centre offers all the different types of communication that your diverse customer base likes to use.
If you target the younger generation, it is commonly accepted that they like to text more than speak. If you target the older generation, it is likely that they want to see the whites of your eyes. Face to face business, or video calls with tutorials help to build relationships.
Some people like to write letters of complaint, rather than speak to people on the phone. These letters must be read and responded to, or the situation escalates. Letters now become emails, or live chat text messages. The written word is powerful, and some people like to use that more than words, only a contact centre can respond and manage this communication. A call center would say “Call us” which is clearly not what the customer wants to do.
What do you choose, Call or Contact?
Now the difference between a call center and a contact centre is clear, which will you choose? Working with conXhub means that the voice communication is crystal clear and with built in SMS2Email and non-voice options, your omnichannel experience for your customers begins, and ends with conXhub.
