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Although the terms ‘contact center’ and ‘call center’ seem synonymous, there are some key differences between the two.

A contact center is a hub for managing customer communications and customer service across multiple channels, including phone, email, live chat, and social media. Customer-facing teams use a contact center software as a single platform through which they can handle conversations coming in from all channels.

A call center, on the other hand, is a hub for customer conversations that occur exclusively via the phone channel. A call center system is used to handle all inbound and outbound phone calls.

But the differences don’t end here. Contact centers and call centers are used for varying business objectives and deliver different experiences to customers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the key differences between a contact center and a call center.

Understanding the differences between a contact center vs a call center

1. Channels of communication

Contact-center: Phone, email, live chat, social media, and more
Call-center: Phone

As previously mentioned, the most basic difference between a contact center and a call center is the channels they use to engage with customers. Call centers, as the name suggests, only use the phone channel for communication. Since phone conversations happen in real-time, a call takes up an agent’s bandwidth is entirely. So, the only way to handle peak volume hours is by staffing up for peak volume hours. However, running a large team can turn out to be quite expensive.

On the other hand, contact centers use digital channels – such as email, social media or live chat, in addition to phone – to engage with customers. In comparison to using the phone as the single channel of communication, using different channels helps in delivering faster solutions and better customer experiences. For instance, with email, you can distribute the load across the team better. Plus, since agents can handle three or more chat conversations in parallel which also reduces staffing/workloads.

Over the years, customers have become more digitally advanced. In fact, customers spend an average of six hours a day online. To keep up with the evolving expectations of customers, brands have expanded their support on different channels. This gives customers the freedom to raise their issues and seek help from any platform they prefer. With contact center software, brands can effortlessly interact with customers and deliver an omnichannel experience.

2. Omnichannel queue management

Contact center: Queue management across channels
Call center: Not applicable

A call center requires a single solution to manage conversations coming in, as all conversations happen only via the phone channel. However, in contact centers, although you’re providing support on multiple channels, you still need one tool to handle all conversations.

A contact center software uses omnichannel queue management to manage conversations coming in through all channels. This enables every incoming request to be viewed from a single platform, allowing admins to easily distribute work across the team. Similarly, agents can use a single solution to manage their workload across all channels.

3. Traditional vs. digital

Contact center: Proactive and reactive support
Call center: Reactive support

With growing customer expectations, business leaders have constantly been tweaking their customer experience strategies to keep up with consumer demands. Traditionally, customers ran into problems and then contacted support for assistance. However, today, brands look to predict problems that customers might run into and proactively offer solutions before the issue gets escalated. This way, brands are able to deliver moments of wow when customers least expect it.

Proactive customer service is highly relevant to today’s context as customers tend to stick to brands that deliver consistently good experiences. The penalty you have to pay for bad customer service can get as severe as losing one in three customers after just one bad experience.

Since contact centers operate in the digital space, they have an edge when it comes to delivering proactive support. Agents can track signals of frustration such as rage clicks or dead clicks on your website or in the product and proactively reach out to the customer to offer assistance. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Slack are a few brands that have adopted a proactive customer service approach. Since call centers only use the phone channel for communication, they might not be able to predict issues as effortlessly as contact centers do.

4. Self-service management

Contact center: Self-service portal, support chatbot, and community forums
Call center: IVR

For too long, customers could only reach a company’s support team through calls. Slowly, as the channels of communication evolved, and emails became the preferred medium – customers didn’t have to wait on hold to reach agents. They could simply send the details of their issue to the support team. However, in both cases, customers were at the mercy of the support team’s timings and workload management.

Customers today prefer finding answers to questions on their own.

In contact centers, you have the option of embedding a chatbot in a self-service portal. So when customers read a solution article and aren’t able to find an answer on their own, they can quickly raise the issue with the chatbot. In case the chatbot isn’t able to resolve the issue, an agent can follow up and offer a solution. Customers can still have a seamless experience throughout as the agent has prior knowledge about the issue which is logged as a ticket or captured as a chat in the contact center software.

Call centers, on the other hand, now offer self-service through an IVR, which is often a time-consuming process. Plus, getting in touch with an agent isn’t easy as there are still long wait hours and a customer might be put on hold for too long.

5. Automatic ticket routing and automations

Contact center: Automations on ticket creation, updates, assignment, and time-based triggers
Call center: Not applicable

Contact centers use automations to route tickets to the right agents based on keywords, previous customer history, agent skills etc. By doing this, contact centers reduce the resolution time for customers and thus deliver a streamlined experience. In contact centers, apart from routing tickets, automation are also used to categorize tickets, update ticket properties and most importantly, follow up and close the loop with customers.

Contact center solutions also have features that are designed exclusively to improve agent productivity. Features such as canned responses, canned forms, and ticketing templates, reduce repetitive tasks and give agents more time to engage with customers. This decreases the chance of burn out and thus, keeps agents on their feet.

6. Unified customer view

Contact center: 360-degree view of customers with integrations
Call center: Not applicable

The center of focus of the call center lies with the phone channel. This means any customer data collected is primarily from telephonic conversations with customers. So call center software might not paint the entire picture of the customer journey or tell you anything about the experience you are delivering.

However, contact center software has as a repository of data aggregated from across channels. You can also integrate your contact center software with your CRM software and get a unified view of your customers. Since all of your support channels are plugged into one platform, you can get a 360-degree view of your customer. Agents can also attach feedback forms at the end of every conversation to gauge if they delivered a good experience.

Plus, you can also integrate your contact center with tools like team collaboration software, marketing automation platforms that you might be using such as Slack, MailChimp, etc, to extend the capabilities of your tool.

3 reasons a contact center is the better solution

The most important difference between a contact center and a call center is related to delivering customer experiences. In today’s digital world, delivering good customer service does not suffice. Brands need to go above and beyond their ways to deliver stellar customer experiences to make a mark and retain customers.

In contact centers, you’re maximizing the chances of providing great customer experiences by

• giving customers multiple ways of reaching out to you
• adopting a proactive approach and delighting customers
• engaging in conversations with 100% context of customers and their issues.

However, in call centers, customers don’t walk away with a great experience as they

• have to wait in long queues to get through to an agent
• are often rerouted to different teams and agents

While call center solutions help you carry out your support operations, contact center solutions take it a step further and help you bring out the best in your customer support team.

Customer support is an essential part of any company. It’s how you address your customers’ issues, assist them with your product, and make sure they’re happy with their purchase.

But beyond that, it can also help you reach your other core business goals.

With the right approach, customer support can play a significant role in your ability to build customer relationships and grow your business.

With a growth-focused mindset, your team can be an integral part of your strategy for reaching your company’s acquisition and revenue goals.

5 Customer Support Hacks to Help Grow Your Business

If you’re not yet taking a growth-focused approach, these 5 customer support hacks can help you make the most of your team’s efforts.

1. Help Your Customers Help Themselves

The first idea on this list doesn’t involve interacting directly with customers. Instead, it centers on building a helpful knowledge base.

And this approach is very much in line with what most audiences want.

In one survey, 91% of people said they would gladly use a self-service knowledge base if one were available to them.

And beyond that, 75% of respondents said they consider a self-service knowledge base a convenient way to resolve a support issue.

Today, this is standard practice for most major brands. For example, Amazon provides step-by-step tutorials for troubleshooting common issues.

The primary advantage here is to customers, as it will often help them find a resolution faster than if they’d had to wait for an available agent.

But it’s helpful to your company, too.

When users are able to solve specific issues themselves, your support team can focus on inquiries that aren’t already addressed on your site — many of which could be from prospective customers.

And speaking with interested potential customers is a much better (and more cost-effective) use of their time than addressing questions that could quickly be addressed in a simple FAQ.

2. Create (and Stick to) SLAs

Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, are policies that determine what an appropriate response time is for each inquiry, depending on its priority level.

Creating SLAs is a great way to set clear expectations for your support team and ensure that each request is handled within a reasonable amount of time.

It will also help your team more efficiently prioritize each ticket that enters your system.

Without a clear prioritization system, your team could easily get bogged down with minor issues that have no real impact on your business.

But when you have a system in place, you can be confident that they’re focusing on high-priority issues.

This way, a major bug that’s rendering your product unusable (and preventing sales) won’t go unnoticed.

3. Use Automation Where You Can

Another way to maximize your team’s efficiency is to use automation wherever you can.

If you work in the customer service field, you may be a little skeptical of this suggestion. And that makes sense.

After all, customer support is mostly about engaging with customers on a personal level and making them feel heard — which an automated response is highly unlikely to do.

But when used correctly, automation can enable your team to help your customers more efficiently.

For example, setting follow-up rules is a great way to make sure agents don’t forget to follow up with customers when necessary.

This rule can help your team as a whole make sure they aren’t overlooking any tickets.

And using automated messages to give customers an estimated wait time (if applicable) isn’t a bad idea, either.

If you can’t get to a user’s inquiry immediately, this is an easy way to reassure them that an agent will speak with them soon — so that they’ll stick around and get the level of customer support you aim to deliver.

4. Express Empathy

One of the best ways to step up your team’s customer support is to focus on empathy.

Unfortunately, this is something that’s severely lacking in customer service as a whole.

As Micah Bennett of Zapier explains, “I’m constantly blown away at how appreciative people are when they get human replies. Years of uncaring or even hostile support experiences have set the bar low for their expectations that they get excited by genuine answers.”

While this is a sad commentary on the state of customer service, it means that it’s not difficult to stand out if you’re willing to spend a few extra seconds making your customers feel heard.

It can be as simple as tailoring your responses to individual users, and expressing that you understand their concern or frustration.

5. Don’t be Afraid to Go the Extra Mile

When most customers reach out to a customer service team, their expectations are fairly low.

They simply want their problem resolved — and in most cases, they don’t expect the experience to be a particularly pleasant one.

As consumers, most of us have had the experience of being put on hold for extended periods of time or waiting an insane amount of time to speak with someone in the first place.

So if you’re able to resolve a customer’s issue quickly and efficiently, you’re already ahead of the game.

But that doesn’t mean you should aim solely for adequacy.

Of course, if your team is pressed for time, with hundreds of requests in the queue, it’s understandable to focus on efficiency.

Still, if there’s an opportunity to go the extra mile, it’s almost always a good idea to take it.

Essentially, you can attribute a large portion of their success to their willingness to go the extra mile for their customers.

And your company doesn’t necessarily need to be quite as over-the-top to replicate this success.

Asking for help should be easy. And fast. Faster than typing out emails. Faster than opening chat windows and typing out the problem. And faster than opening an app and searching for the solution.

Can your customers ask for help easily? And how fast can you deliver? Till recently, it was difficult to furnish this instant voice support in a scalable, accessible way. Then voice bots came along.

Voice bots are voice-powered user interfaces that can understand natural language and use it to converse with people. Simply put, they are computers that can converse like people. For your business, these bots are a scalable way to interact with your customer and speed up resolutions. If implemented correctly and appropriately, they can help your customer support achieve its central premise. That is, to solve customer’s problems as fast as possible.

How can Voice Bots Improve Customer Support?

1. By Overhauling IVR and Routing

Do you want to connect callers to agents who are trained to resolve their problems without an annoyingly long IVR menu? Voice bots are a pleasing option. They can ask callers why they’ve called, much like a human secretary, and intelligently connect them to the right department.

2. By Improving Chats

When it comes to speed, voice beats typing hands down. Voice bots can be present on live chat windows, emails, apps, social media letting customers choose to just say what it is that is bothering them instead of typing in lengthy texts.

3. By Scaling Up Your Voice Operations

Your voice bot platform can carry out human-like conversations in superhuman ways. That is, a single voice bot platform engages with thousands of customers simultaneously while giving personalized attention to each. By giving away a large chunk of repetitive tasks to voice bots, you will be able to manage far more support issues than before.

4. By Reducing Transaction Times

Certain tasks can be performed faster by machines than by people. Your bot can complete repetitive tasks like booking, cancellations, ticket status faster than human agents.

5. By Humanizing Your Support Center.

The truth is a lot of the times, our support staff tends to sound more like machines than they should. Repetitive tasks and high pressure to wrap calls saps the humanity out of a support center. With bots taking over the repetitive tasks, and hopefully reducing workloads, customer support executives can be trained and given the time needed to deliver human connection when it is really needed.

6. By Giving a Voice to Your Self-service

Self-service can be made more scalable and customer friendly by using voice bots. Instead of sifting through FAQs online or on web communities, your customer can ask bots their frequently asked questions. For example, we have deployed voice interfaces to help callers make hotel inquiries or clarify FAQs.

How to Implement a Voice Bot?

It takes a developer between 12- 20 days to develop your voice bot. But for a genuinely effective solution, you need to do some spadework. Here are 4 suggested guidelines for implementing your bot:

1. Do I Need a Bot? Define Problems.

Being clear about what you want your voice bot to achieve is the first and most critical step in implementing a bot. Revise your customer support process to see where bot intervention will be effective. Are you failing on certain CX metrics? Find problems and explore them a bit, to define what you want your bot to do.

For example, are your callers waiting for more than 12 seconds in a queue? Split the calls you receive into categories. Identify where human intervention is necessary (for e.g placating an upset customer, attention to a high priority customer) And where bots can perform tasks faster (For example FAQ questions, booking, reservations)

2. Will Callers Like my Bot? Develop User-oriented Solutions

User acceptance and adoption is critical for your voice bot’s success. You may want to reduce call queues, but will your users be happy to hear a bot? You don’t want a high-value customer who is happy with phone support to be diverted to a voice bot.

Understand which users should interact with a bot and which should not.

Just like you split your process, you need to bucket your users. Maybe your voice could take care of the new users or casual inquiries so that important callers are diverted faster to a live agent.

Understand what conversations users would like to have with bots and which they wouldn’t. We’ve covered before that people may prefer bots for quick transactions. But dissecting typical conversations might also help you discover clever ways to reduce talk times. Your user may be ok with answering 1-2 levels of questions with a bot, then they may want to talk to a person. Or they may want to explain their problem to a person and then be diverted to a bot. They may need 1-2 sessions of handholding, where a human agent is available throughout to get used to the bot.

3. What Should my Bot Know? Build a Knowledge Base

The third stage in implementing your bot is getting your knowledge base together for it. That is, once you have clearly defined what your bot is going to do, this stage will involve gathering as much information as possible to make your bot effective. For example, access to user details, product details, contact numbers. What all databases will they have access to? Will they integrate with your support desk software? Will they have third party contact details to transfer calls to if required?

4. Creating Your Bot

Now your developer has everything needed to build your bot. They will plan your bot flow. They will decide where you need algorithms to recognize entities, or intent or sentiment. They will create tight scripts including concise questions and answers based on your user research. And create personas using elements of voice like pitch, tone, accent. (For example, depending on your business, your bot can sound fun, casual or professional). They will use this persona to define language style and fillers. And very soon your bot will be ready for action.

What Features Should my Voice Bot Have?

All voice interfaces use Natural Language Processing or NLP to interpret words. But what differentiates one bot platform from another? What features ensure a smooth conversation?

The ability to understand meaning: We are not always literal when we speak. A bot should be able to use Intent analysis to extract the meaning behind words. For example, they should be able to understand that when a person says “sure” or “why not” they are most likely saying yes. And when they say, “I’m good”, “later” and “not really”, they’re probably saying “no”.

The ability to pause and listen: It may sound rude but being able to interrupt a bot is one of its best features. Ever got annoyed during a long IVR monologue? By contrast, you should be able to interrupt a bot. For example, if you say “no, I’m not interested”, “or you got it wrong, that’s not what I’m looking for”, or “sorry, could you repeat that”, your bot should be able to pause, listen and speak accordingly.

Streaming recognition: As with all technology, speed is essential to a pleasant experience. You voice bot should be able to interpret at the same rate at which your customer speaks. There shouldn’t be any lags.

Personalization: Your caller should not have to repeat themselves. Integrations with your support desk software should ensure that your bot greets caller by name, knows caller history, can estimate most likely reason for calling based on this history and personalize suggestions based on all this customer knowledge.

Access to live agents: At any time during an interaction, your caller should easily be able to revert to a live agent. You should define user-oriented fallback rules, such as, if your bot can’t understand the user issue within a single question, you should revert to a live agent on priority.

AI-powered to continuously learn: An AI-powered bot doesn’t stop learning. It continuously improves its accuracy based on previous results.

The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system makes sure that callers can navigate to the right team through nothing more than a series of keypad presses.

After all, with an IVR system in place, businesses can

1.  Automate the customer identification process with voice prompts
2.  Predict why customers are calling to speed up service
3.  Collect important information from the customer during wait time
4.  Prioritize calls based on value
5.  Personalize messages and prompts
6.  Handle high call volume and surges efficiently
7.  Ensure customers are routed to the best agent for their issue
8.  Track and report customer issues to improve future service
9.  Reduce overhead costs, including staffing

Cloud-based IVR systems are flexible to implement — and equally popular with small and mid-sized businesses whose goal is to avoid costly and unwieldy infrastructure. A thoughtfully deployed IVR is a confidence builder for customers – imagine the delight of approaching a support call with pleasure instead of dread.

Cloud-based tools are also constantly evolving to make agents and customer lives easier and simpler. IVR systems, thankfully, will continue to play a pivotal role, mainly because there is so much scope for scalability and innovation. Here are some key areas through which you can evolve your IVR:

Application-Programming Interface (API) Based Interaction

Customers are the best ambassadors for your business. As extensive users of your product, they are always looking for ways to maximize ROI — and are likely to rely heavily on support. This dependency is critical, so IVR systems will add flexibility by supporting APIs that enable integration with other vendors and applications. These integrations unlock a host of ways for your IVR to intelligently route your customers and provide greater personalization; they hold a promise of contextual awareness that will elevate your customer experience.

Information Extensions

Customer issues present themselves in endless variety. With an IVR system in place, the most common customer problems, the ones that don’t necessarily require an agent to tackle like your account balance, can be tackled with an automated response. On the other hand, if customer problems are unique, then agents can be ready to address them immediately. With information extensions, customers can be routed in tighter, more efficient systems that improve response times and customer satisfaction by providing self-service options.

Improved User Interface

In the world of customer service, the mantra for the future is “less is always more.” As popular as the telephone is, by the time customers reach a support agent, they are often frustrated. Despite the self-serve nature of phone support, it’s essential to manage the process to keep menu options to a minimum, avoid marketing messages, and above all minimize wait times. It’s critical to test and re-test the IVR experience to make sure the process is not losing you customers.

Business Value and Impact

Having the right IVR system in place has significant benefits for businesses. The ability to track the campaigns that are driving the conversations means you can adjust your messaging and hone your responses. Conducting customer surveys and tracking marketing and sales activities brings valuable insights that are bound to fuel customer acquisition, target the right prospects, support sales efforts, and improve revenue strategies.