Customer experience is very important in any business. Increasing complexities in the requirements and expectations of the customers have forced brands to adopt tools and processes that serve customers promptly. To achieve this, businesses have started establishing dedicated customer care departments within the organization.
These customer care departments resemble a full-fledged contact center than a conventional call center.
Call center and contact center both sound similar and thus, people often use these two terms as synonyms. However, both of these represent completely different contexts.
To make it easier for you to understand and invest in the one that is most suitable for your business, I will explain the difference between a call center and a contact center. You will learn about both of these setups with respective pros and cons.
What Is a Call Centre?
A call center is a department inside many organizations that handles incoming and outgoing client calls. Representatives essentially give on-the-phone assistance for client questions and strive to give first call resolutions. Several SMB companies recruit a few agents. The MNCs and bigger enterprises may have hundreds of agents delivering customer care services.
Amidst several businesses, standard call center representatives handle 40 to 50 calls every day. Their calls incorporate calls of common questions, billing issues, purchases, shipment status updates, and professional support. Usually, they use a call center software with standard features. Some companies also use a call center solution with an integrated CRM solution to view extensive customer information that assists provide context to the client’s call. An added advantage of call center solutions involves the capacity for agents to spontaneously indulge in a dialogue with the subsequent caller to reduce downtime.
Call center agents are also qualified to propose possibilities for upsells and cross-sells. This empowers them to produce more income per customer. They are usually skilled to be patient, well-spoken, and empathetic with customers.
What Is a Contact Center?
A contact center is made of client experience experts who embrace a broad spectrum of digital channels. These experts are proficient at giving outstanding customer experiences via incoming and outgoing calls, screen sharing, WhatsApp messaging, email, SMS, instant messaging, social media, video conferencing, and more.
Contact centers are invented to promote communications with clients in any way they favor, which empowers representatives to be further available so that clients can get a quicker resolution. Instead of dialing a customer care number and remain in the call queue until the next agent gets available, customers can send a live chat message via their website or on WhatsApp number or their favored social media sites and multitask until they get the response. This is recognized as asynchronous communication, and it is growing very prevalent among customers. On the other hand, for other questions, clients can send an email. With contact centers, businesses continue traditional service with multiple competitive benefits.
Automation tools available in the call center solutions are popular amongst contact centers. These mechanisms empower businesses to get a further proactive position in giving significant customer data, facilitate them to reduce wait times, and save the resources of the company.
The contact center uses multiple communication channels and collects the required data points for an individual customer. This way, the contact center assures seamless and enhanced customer experience.
Call Center vs. Contact Center
Call centers focus on a single locus, which is to render classic client experience on-the-phone. As an outcome, call center operators usually understand how to identify ingenious signals to assist them to lead the talk to a positive conclusion. Skilled agents and feature-rich call center solutions give the required ability to quickly understand the issue faced by the customer and control the situation even if the customer is furious. Call center solution and trained agents are an essential component of various customer care departments.
Contact centers possess a more widespread order crossing multiple communication channels. They only concentrate on a mission to give an exceptional customer experience. Contact center agents typically switch between different communication channels such as the phone, WhatsApp, live chat, SMS, email, and other communication means to help clients by any midpoints reasonable. This frequently enables them to render more extensive assistance. The call center solutions used by the contact center are often omnichannel call center solutions, also referred as contact center solutions.
Because of the single-channel communication principal, call centers are confined in their strength to communicate with clients. This gets more difficult for call centers to collect user feedback and assist clients to reengage with the brand. Contact centers, furthermore, can register email campaigns, automated SMS followups, and live chat to evaluate in on client fulfillment rates once the issue gets resolved. This is particularly helpful since contact centers can then apply this as an opportunity to accumulate client reviews and ratings to showcase publicly and gain certain marketing advantages.
As call centers stringently attend and make phone calls to clients, they may barely accumulate data throughout phone conversation. Contact centers, including their broad assemblage of customer touchpoints, accumulate considerably more information that empowers agents to entirely personalize the client experience.
The calls are real-time and thus they demand fixed hours working in the call centers. Contact centers assist to resolve this barrier by endeavoring further channels of giving concerns and inquiries via WhatsApp, social media, email, etc. In such an asynchronous communication mode, the customers can wait for the response even till the next day, unlike phone calls where they cannot stay on hold till the next day.
Which Is the Best?
Based on the information shared and the widespread features made available, it may seem that the contact center is the best. Well, hang on.
Both, contact center and call center are prominent according to the context. Based on the circumstances one needs to make a choice. Here is one scenario. If you have hundreds of customers and 40% of them are requesting answers to their queries daily, then definitely you need an omnichannel call center solution to run a contact center. On the other hand, even if you have hundreds of clients, but only 5% or less are contacting you for the query resolution, then you need to set up a call center with a call center solution.
