Contact centers, their importance and advantages

• What is a contact center?

A contact center is a central point from which organizations manage all customer interactions across various channels. Its main purpose is to offer customers efficient and effective technical support, customer service and sales assistance.

Contact centers typically include one or more call centers, but can also include other types of customer contact channels, including emails, web chats, and social media interactions. Additionally, organizations often integrate contact centers with their customer relationship management (CRM) strategies.

Contact centers are growing in importance as customers increasingly expect organizations to be constantly available across multiple channels, not just by phone. Contact centers take an omnichannel approach, enabling them to improve customer service, increase efficiency, and improve insights into customer behavior and needs to create better customer experiences.

• How do contact centers work?

Contact centers typically include agents who handle omnichannel customer support, including calls, email, chat, and website support. Contact centers are similar to call centers, but go beyond simply handling calls to reach customers on their preferred channels.

Some of the key features of a contact center are:

• Automatic call or chat distributor (ACD) systems, which allow contact center agents to increase the number of calls or chats received while maintaining a positive customer experience.

• Real-time reporting, allowing contact centers to observe and analyze agent performance and customer satisfaction across the various channels used.

• Scripts, which provide agents with a framework to provide callers with effective support and generate sales or resolution of their needs.

• Automation of processes that allow faster and more effective service.

Contact center vs. Call Center: What are the differences?

Contact centers and call centers are customer service centers. Many people use the two terms interchangeably, even though they shouldn't. The main difference is that call centers only handle incoming or outgoing calls, while a contact center offers omnichannel customer support.

Modular contact center infrastructure also enables managers to improve team efficiency and allows teams to benefit from better security measures, more secure data, and greater flexibility.

While contact centers serve several functions, call centers specifically manage telephone interactions, including inbound and outbound calls. Like contact centers, call centers typically support customer service, technical support, or sales interactions. However, organizations can also use them for telemarketing, information gathering, debt or payment collection, and fraud prevention.

• What are the benefits of a contact center?

Contact centers offer several advantages over call centers.

• Save time and money. Contact centers allow customers to self-service and resolve their issues with keyword-based two-way instant messaging, text messaging, or communication with a chatbot. This self-service reduces the amount of time agents spend on the phone, reducing customer wait times and reducing overall costs.

• Better customer information. Contact centers can improve customer profiles. When customers interact with call or contact centers, they share information about their personal preferences and behavior, which agents can collect and use to improve the service experience in future interactions. Organizations can also integrate CRM software with contact centers to collect more customer data and analyze it efficiently.

• Improve the service experience. Call center agents can collect data through their calls, but the digital channels that contact centers use make the process easier and more effective. Contact center software collects customer data from each channel used and compiles it into a single customer profile. Because most contact center customers interact through multiple channels, the center collects more data. More data can allow the contact center to tailor CX to benefit specific people and better route calls and other communications.

• Better use of interactive voice response systems. Call centers use IVR as an automated digital assistant that operates over the phone through vocal prompts and keyboard inputs. IVR in call centers often makes it difficult to reach a live agent and resolve issues efficiently. However, contact centers create IVRs with the service experience in mind. Contact center managers design IVR to predict caller intent and direct callers to the most appropriate agent. Other times, IVR can resolve customer queries and issues without involving live agents.

Types of contact centers and use cases

The different types of contact centers are hardware, cloud-based, hosted, and virtual.

• Hardware contact centers. Organizations can install and host hardware contact centers on local physical servers. Consequently, hardware contact centers require organizations to have sufficient space and capacity to house and maintain servers, effective disaster recovery procedures, and competent hardware upgrade processes.

• Cloud-based contact centers. The cloud providers' Internet servers host these contact centers, which filter all incoming and outgoing communications. Contact center agents can access cloud-based contact centers from anywhere on the Internet.

• Hosted contact centers. For these contact centers, the organization outsources the infrastructure to another company that manages the systems externally. This approach can minimize upfront costs and maintenance, often leading to a better return on investment.

• Virtual contact centers. These contact centers allow agents to work remotely. Virtual contact centers create flexibility and convenience for contact center agents while reducing costs for the organization.

• Contact center capabilities and infrastructure

Organizations often build contact center infrastructure to support communications in the same facilities as the contact center, just as with hardware centers. Or, organizations can outsource the infrastructure for the other three types and have it hosted externally by other companies.

In an on-premises scenario, the organization also owns and manages its hardware and software. This approach requires investments in staff and IT, some organizations outsource to cloud providers or hosting companies.

Operations research and analysis and mathematical models, such as queuing theory, can support contact center performance. However, contact centers support multiple channels, so they do not have to support universal queues. Instead, they can use separate systems with different business processes.

• Contact center technologies

Technologies used to maintain and improve contact center performance include the following:

• ACD system: analyzes incoming calls and distributes them based on various factors.

• Email Response Management System: collects and analyzes customer inquiries sent via email and then routes those inquiries to the appropriate agent.

• IVR system: allows customers to use a keyboard or voice commands to provide information without human assistance.

• Knowledge management system: a central repository of information that agents can easily search, which can reduce agent training time.

• TTY/TDD Communications: Teletypewriters (TTY) and telecommunications display devices (TDD) provide assistance to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

• Workforce management system: Helps schedule and staff agents and manage their performance.

Contact center systems often use call center software. For example, virtual contact centers can use virtual call center software to create a channel for remote agents to manage phone calls as if they were in a centralized call center. However, contact center software often builds on these core capabilities to further integrate services across multiple channels and allow agents to route contact information, track contacts, and collect data.

• The future of contact centers

As technology evolves and customers rely on new communication channels, contact centers must continue to adapt and grow. Trends affecting contact center communications include the following:

• Social media. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have become popular platforms for communicating with customers, so it is important for organizations to support these channels.

• Mobile access. Customers demand support for mobile-friendly communication services, such as app and text support.

• Videotelephony. IP/video telephony services, such as FaceTime and Zoom, allow customers to interact with organizations via video chat, allowing for more personal face-to-face interactions.

• Advanced analytics. Analytics play an increasingly important role in predicting customer behavior. Organizations can also use voice analytics to monitor, evaluate, and train contact center employees.

A highlight of the future of contact centers, looking at social networks, mobile access and video telephony.

Experts expect AI and augmented reality (AR) technology to take on prominent roles within contact centers. Currently, AI development is focused on agent support tools that can listen to calls and follow agent prompts to track customer service records and suggest answers to customer issues during a live conversation. AR introduces a visual element to live agent and customer interactions, so agents can suggest and show solutions to technical problems that verbal descriptions over the phone or chat can't replicate.