Customer interaction plays a pivotal role in ensuring excellent services and measuring a business’ operational efficiency. This is the reason why it’s essential to hire and train staff in improving their communication and negotiation skills. The most popular channels that businesses can use are the contact center and call center.
These two commonly used channels may sound the same to some. In fact, they are often mistaken for the same thing. Both channels can push your customer service team to perform at maximum efficiency. However, it’s important to understand the key differences that set them apart.
It’s important to understand the difference between a contact center and a call center. Discover how each channel can help you optimize business processes. Read more.
What is a contact center?
A contact center refers to a department that manages all customer interactions across different channels, including the phone. Advanced contact centers tend to focus more on digital technologies. It has multiple functions, but the most popular contact center solutions include delivering responses via social media, email, chat, messaging apps, and even self-service options.
Contact centers offer plenty of benefits that could help business owners improve every customer journey. To provide seamless experiences to clients, there are virtual contact centers offering the following advantages:
- More reliable delivery of inclusive and personalized services
- Omnichannel support
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Increase in sales
- Better and more valuable relationships with customers
- Enhanced knowledge of customer preferences and needs
There are six types of contact centers: Inbound, Outbound, Multichannel, Omnichannel, Cloud, and On-Premise.
What is a call center?
According to UC, the call center is a centralized department set up to handle phone calls. While contact centers focus on responding to customer inquiries and concerns through different digital channels, call centers provide specific services. As its name suggests, a call center is in charge of fielding inbound and outbound phone calls.
This means that call center agents are responsible for handling incoming calls to resolve issues and improve customer care. They also make outgoing calls to initiate customer surveys and market and sell new products and services.
Just like modern contact center solutions, business call centers offer several benefits to make every customer experience better:
- Consistent conversations with customers
- Enhanced staff productivity
- Cost-savings
- Professional handling of customer requests and queries
- Boost in sales
- Bigger competitive advantage
You can choose from six types of call centers: Inbound, Outbound, Automated, Multichannel, Omnichannel, and Virtual Call Centers.
What industries need contact centers and call centers the most?
Handling repetitive tasks can be a daunting job for your in-house staff. This is why employing a remote team to work on your contact center or manage a call center is a great idea. Call centers and contact centers are usually associated with sales and marketing industries. But customer relationship management is also an important part of the following industries:
- Healthcare
- Automotive
- Hospitality
- Food
- Insurance
- Banking and Finance
These industries experience a high influx of calls from customers and customer service issues on a daily basis. Having a reliable channel of communication between the business and its customer base is an effective way to monitor customer engagement and achieve operational excellence.
What are the key differences between call center and contact center?
Choosing the most appropriate contact channels for your business can be tricky. It is important to know the differences between a call center and a contact center, considering the wide range of communication channel options available in the market.
Both aim to resolve issues from frustrated customers, find long-term solutions to common customer issues, and reach out to potential customers to boost sales. But they also differ in the following ways:
1. Methods and Channels
Single Platform vs Multichannel Support
The key difference between the two is the channel used. A contact center uses multiple platforms and channels to resolve simple and complex issues from customers. While a call center focuses on using a single platform – the phone.
Call centers are considered more traditional, because they came first before digital customer support channels. Despite its key features being limited to inbound calls and outbound calls, it’s still a popular choice for business owners. Phone calls offer a natural and more personalized experience to customers. Contact centers, on the other hand, boast a wide variety of channels that could fit the needs and preferences of customers.
2. Data
More flexible data gathering techniques for contact centers
Having a single channel doesn’t hinder a call center in gathering necessary customer information to improve their support. However, contact centers having additional channels makes it easier for them to collect and process larger amounts of customer data.
Call centers have the phone channel as their only means of customer information gathering. With this, a call center’s data gathering method is exclusive to analyzing calls. Call analysis is done with the help of speech analysis software. The purpose of analyzing calls is to gain insights into the preferences and personalities of customers.
Contact centers and their digital channels allow more opportunities to collect data. Their methods range from phone calls, social media engagements, and other customer communications:
- Analyzing customer calls
- Social media monitoring
- Online surveys and profiling
- Text and email campaigns
Tracking social media engagements through likes, comments, shares, and reactions is an effective way to evaluate customer conversations and interactions. Customer profiling can also help businesses determine the active demographics of their markets and assess relevant customer issues.
3. Skills Required for Agents
Customer service is a must for both
Traditional call center agents need excellent customer service skills and empathy to make the entire customer journey memorable for every client. Making calls to customers and managing outbound calls requires call center agents to develop excellent communication skills, patience, and the rest will follow. However, for contact center representatives and agents, their skills should match the preferred channels of every customer. This means that human agents should maintain the following skills:
- Verbal communication skills
- Personability
- Problem-solving
- Multitasking
- Basic social media etiquette
- Technology-savvy
These set of skills are also applicable to remote agents to ensure that the company’s internal communication will be smooth. Choosing the correct agent for every contact center task will also help your in-house team focus better on core processes and avoid workflow backlogs.
4. Technology
Using the newest equipment and utilizing messaging software with advanced features are proven ways to enhance user experience on any platform. Both contact centers and call centers use basic equipment like phones, computers, and headsets. But apart from these, companies should also invest in the following technologies to secure a competitive edge in the industry:
Call Centers
Having a reliable phone system is crucial for call centers to provide customer service and real-time assistance to their clients. From effective call routing to proper call flow monitoring and call volume management, these are the most essential technologies that inbound call centers and outbound call centers utilize.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Its phone assistant function can help choose the right agent or department to help a customer based on voice and keypad responses.
Automatic Call Distributors (ACD)
Right after the IVR finds the right agent or department to manage the customer’s inquiry or issue, automatic call distribution will transfer the call.
Speech Analysis Software
This type of software is used to analyze and evaluate voice calls based on the emotions of customers during the call. Anger, frustration, delight, and satisfaction are the most commonly analyzed emotions in call centers. Speech analysis can help businesses reach out to dissatisfied customers and prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.
Workforce Management System
Call centers that experience a surge in customer demands usually face challenges in maintaining agent performance and availability. Having a reliable workforce management system aids in scheduling capable agents in case the designated ones are unavailable for the day.
Fast and Reliable Internet Services
Having a stable internet connection can shorten the average handle time for customer queries. It will also help agents resolve issues in real time, resulting in customer satisfaction and repeat business.
Contact Centers
Contact centers provide prompt assistance to clients with the above mentioned technologies. But to optimize operations, contact center agents need the following:
Email Response Management System
Managing huge volumes of emails can be a daunting task. Thanks to the email response management system, you and your staff can easily organize, track, and archive emails depending on their purpose and content.
Omnichannel Routing
With the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), agents could easily locate interactions with customers within different channels. An omnichannel contact center encourages manageability and accessibility of cross-channel interactions for agents. And for contact centers that use alternative channels to build a valuable client-business relationship leading to the firm’s success.
Advanced Analytics
Modern customer service hubs use advanced analytics to boost a company’s customer service capabilities. By employing a combination of AI and traditional customer service best practices, you can do the following:
- Learn more comprehensive customer insights
- Gather common customer questions to create effective knowledge bases
- Provide long-term solutions to frequent customer sentiments
- Make business predictions
- Monitor customer profiles and changes in demographic data.
Channel Reports
Setting firm yet reasonable Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is essential in monitoring the individual performance of agents. To create KPI, reporting software will collect raw data across channels, including first contact resolution and customer effort score.
5. Customer Self-Service Options
Call centers nowadays use IVR as a self-service tool for customers. However, IVR can also lengthen the support process because of its indirect approach which could annoy customers. Contact centers offer plenty of customer self-service options, which include knowledge bases, FAQ webpages, chatbots, canned responses, and forums.
What are some proven ways to ensure an amazing customer service experience?
Businesses invest in the most advanced channel for communication to reach out to customers and provide the best experience to everyone. Regardless of your channel choice, it is equally important to adopt the best customer service practices to improve agent efficiency and productivity. Here are some of the ways you can ensure an amazing customer service experience for your current and potential customer base:
- Maintain excellent product and service knowledge.
- Keep an optimistic attitude at all times.
- Offer personalized solutions to customer issues.
- Respond quickly and politely.
- Give plenty of self-service solutions.
- Invest in 24/7 customer support.
- Be attentive to every customer inquiry.
- Set realistic and attainable expectations.
- Take initiative and respond proactively.
- Maintain a solid and reliable communication channel.
Read more: 10 Golden Rules of Customer Service to Keep Customers Delighted
What are the things that you should look for in a call center or a contact center?
Mutual Goals
When you’re planning to outsource a call center or a contact center, having mutual goals with your outsourcing partner is important. Listing down your top priorities can help you have a harmonious business relationship with your service provider. What is your primary goal?
Do you want to focus purely on customer support, or do you also want to increase your revenue? Sharing the same goals with your service provider is only a start. Before setting up your strategy, consider analyzing and evaluating basic KPIs like first call resolution (FCR) and average handling time (AHT).
Competent Staff
Whether it’s about making sales calls or handling various channels of communication, hiring the right people is a crucial part of any business. Ensure that your team, whether in-house or remote, can handle complex digital workflows and minimize customer complaints. Skills should include empathy, communication, the ability to work under different business hours, attentiveness, and a sense of accountability.
Adaptability to modern technologies is also a must. Hire customer service representatives who are proficient in any type of chat software, capable of utilizing cloud-based solutions, and competent in comprehensive analytics.
You should also make sure that every staff member is properly trained and experienced in conflict resolution. This will help your business effectively deal with the demands of angry customers.
Quality and Advanced Tools
There are plenty of call center and contact center software available in the market nowadays. When establishing your own customer service channel, choosing a service provider with advanced tools is important. To maintain a convenient and user-friendly platform, set up a support channel that can be accessed through a mobile app.
Positive Reviews
In customer service, looking at a complete picture to see your business’s strengths and weaknesses can benefit your company. Have a 360-degree view of your ideal contact center or call center by checking feedback from businesses and customers.
This means that you should be monitoring what other people and businesses think of your service provider. Take note of the positive reviews and study all negative reviews to see if you can have a fantastic working dynamic with your provider.
Which trends can help every customer engagement platform increase its efficiency?
Traditional call center practices are still effective in optimizing business-customer interactions. But along with the emergence of cloud-based contact centers and the availability of virtual call center software, trends have also changed.
We’ve narrowed down the list of trends that can help every customer engagement platform become more efficient this 2025:
Online Communities
More companies are investing in building and improving online communities to encourage customer interactions and active engagements. Online communities provide a fun and convenient way for businesses to collect and monitor feedback from customers.
Virtual Events & Webinars
To create a productive relationship with your customers, hosting virtual events and webinars is a great strategy. Apart from introducing new products and services, you can enhance brand power through informative and educational online conferences and webinars.
Mobile-Optimized Interface
Call center and contact center operations involve complex processes. But this doesn’t mean that companies can’t provide quick and convenient support to their customers. If your customers are always on the go, a mobile-optimized communication channel would be a great way to keep up with their go-to demands. Make sure that your channel or platform will be neat, easy to navigate, and user-friendly.
Social Messaging Apps
More and more contact center services are using social networking sites as their primary communication channel. Currently, there are 4.8 billion social media users in the world. That’s 59.9% of the entire world population. So, if you don’t have at least one social media app dedicated to customer interaction, you’re missing a lot.
Influencer Marketing
This type of marketing is known for its huge impact on increasing brand awareness and widening a business’ target market. Seeking help from reputable influencers with a positive track record can entice your existing market to engage more with your brand. They also have the power to encourage potential customers to do the same.
Cloud Contact Center Software
If you need a contact center platform that can be easily accessed by your agents, a cloud contact center might be the best choice for you. Operated on a remote server infrastructure and managed by a contact center provider, businesses can have convenient access through a secure internet connection. Cloud contact centers include key functionalities like call recording and monitoring, IVR, omnichannel routing, cloud infrastructure, and real-time analytics.
With this, contact center agents are capable of delivering seamless support from anywhere with an internet connection. This will give both clients and businesses an exceptionally smooth contact center experience.
Want to know the best cloud contact center software for businesses? This list with reviews might help you find the right contact center software for your business.
Call Center vs Contact Center – What’s the Ideal Channel for Your Business?
The terms call center and contact center might sound similar. But the scope of their services and solutions sets them apart. Choosing the right channel for your business can be determined by factors such as the type of product and service that you offer, its current demand, and your target market.
Simply put, if you want raw and direct communication with your customers, call center agents interact with customers better. Many call centers still prefer to utilize an experienced workforce rather than completely relying on technology to serve customers. In fact, a 2023 data claims that roughly 41% of companies believe that product and service-related problems are resolved better with calls. With this, call centers are still very popular, and plenty of businesses still use call centers to communicate with their customers.
On the other hand, customer contact centers provide incredible multichannel contact solutions to customers. Contact centers handle different types of inquiries from different types of customers, from different demographics. While a call center consists of agents that encourage customers to call, contact centers can provide a range of contact solutions to resolve issues. If you have a business that caters to a large target market, contact center agents use various types of channels to keep in touch with customers.
Both call and contact centers provide reliable assistance to businesses and their consumers. But if you are in need of flexibility and efficiency, a multichannel contact center is the way to go.
Contact Center vs Call Center: Final Thoughts
Now that you already know what’s the difference between contact centers and call centers, it is time for you to start building a solid and stable customer engagement and support platform for your business. You can hire an in-house team to work on exceeding customer expectations and managing customer interactions. But hiring a remote team can help you save so much in operational costs.
You may enjoy the benefits of contact centers and call centers by outsourcing your customer support team with us! Digital Minds BPO offers plenty of services dedicated to providing the highest quality of customer care, driving sales, and increasing brand awareness. We can provide you with the best contact center and call center solutions to help you secure a competitive edge in the industry.
Need a competent team of agents to handle calls and chat with your customers during peak volume hours? We’ve got you covered! Contact us now and start your call center outsourcing journey with us. We look forward to helping you build your dreams!