What is a Contact Center?

A contact center is a physical or virtual department where a company handles customer inquiries and most commonly is a part of the customer service function. Companies staff contact centers with agents who are trained to deal with service issues. They can handle inquiries via digital channels (e.g., email, chat, messaging), inbound calls, outbound calls, or blended (handling both types of calls).

They will typically utilize some type of computer automation software such as an automatic contact distributor (ACD) to route calls and digital messages to the appropriate agent. Contact center software is critical to ensuring a great customer experience, enabling companies to quickly connect customers to the agent best trained to handle their customer service issue.

Companies looking to modernize operations and transform their ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences are increasingly turning to cloud contact center software solutions, as they offer greater agility and flexibility to meet rapidly changing customer expectations.

What’s the difference between a contact center and a call center?

It is not uncommon for either term to be used when talking about the place customers go to interact with a company for service or sales. There is a difference in that a call center focuses on telephone-based interactions with customers, whereas a contact center supports multiple interaction channels including voice (telephone), chat, email, messaging and more. Contact centers that can support multiple channels are often called multichannel.

In most cases, specific agents are assigned to each channel. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage interactions across multiple channels simultaneously and customers can seamlessly move between them to solve their service issues. Today, the trend is rapidly moving to contact centers, driven by consumer preference to utilize digital channels they are comfortable with in their personal interactions to engage companies.