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The difference between a Call Center and a Contact Center

You may have heard of both concepts before, Call Center and Contact Center. These are two completely different services but many often confuse the concepts, which is not so strange when they sound the same. Confusing the two can lead to companies spending time looking for the wrong type of suppliers. Something that is ineffective when it comes to time and money.

Below we explain the different concepts and what they mean for a company.

What is a Call Center?

Simply put, a Call Center is a place where agents handle calls. This can be both incoming or outgoing calls. Outgoing calls are often sales calls where the agents sit and call customers to sell a service or product. When it comes to incoming calls, it can be what you call answering service, Callcenters responds when your company has no time to take the call. Then the agents respond after a specified script so that the customer feels like they have come to your company. When Callcenters receives incoming calls, it can also be about receiving orders.

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Historically, Callcenters have often worked more with location-specific hardware closely linked to the telecommunications infrastructure in order to handle large quantities of calls. The service, as we see it today, has been around since the 1960s when the first automatic call distribution system, also called ACD, was invented. This meant that you could now assign incoming calls to several agents based on what was available or what knowledge they possessed.

Call Center has traditionally focused on reducing costs and streamlining agents’ handling of customers, which unfortunately gave them a bit of a bad reputation. Agents working under severe pressure are perceived as stressed and impersonal. End customers have often experienced Callcenters solely as people who sit and “snuggle”. Some work with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems so that the customer can talk to an actual person to the minimum extent and thus keep costs down.

But this is definitely not the truth for all Callcenters. Well-renowned Callcenters have agents with cutting-edge expertise in customer management and have so much knowledge of the company that the customer does not feel that it has arrived anywhere other than the company he called. With a good Call Center, a company can therefore enhance the customer experience while streamlining customer management.

Summary:

A Call Center is a center where agents make calls or receive calls on behalf of other companies.

What is a Contact Center?

A Contact center is a software and thus not a  physical place. What a Contact Center makes it contact channels to one place. This can be incoming calls, email, texts, chat and social media. Now you might be thinking “Okay, but why should you have one?”.

Well, suppose you are a support technician at a company and you receive customer questions via email, phone and Facebook. As you probably understand, it is both difficult to keep track of all the channels at the same time and partly it is difficult to prioritize which matters to take first. This is where a Contact Center comes in handy. By gathering all contact paths in one and the same interface, agents can more clearly see which cases are pending, prioritize and allocate workload among themselves.

Contact Centers have enabled companies to open contact paths for their customers and enable customers to contact companies in any way they wish. Something that often increases customer satisfaction.

Summary:

A Contact Center is a software that gathers different contact channels into one and the same interface.

So what kind of service should you as an entrepreneur buy?

As you probably notice, Callcenters and Contact Centers perform very different functions when it comes to keeping in touch with your customers.

Does your company have a very large amount of incoming calls with simpler questions that you can’t handle. Then Callcenters can be a good alternative.

Does your company have a large number of calls to sell a product or service? Then Callcenters can be a good solution.

Your company has customers who want to contact you in many different ways and you want to be able to collect all of this in the same interface. Then it is a Contact Center you are looking for.

Dstny’s own Contact center

Are you interested in learning more about Dstny’s own Contact Center? Then you can find more information by clicking on the button.

 

Latest update jan 2020