Contact Centre and Call Centre: How do these differ!

Posted by Prachi Priya

When we talk about call centre outsourcing and contact centre assistance, people have this assumption that both services are the same and are synonyms for each other. However, do you know the difference between contact centre and call centre? Both are similar and are used reciprocally, however, have two different meanings. There are numerous call centres in the United Kingdom and in India but have you any idea over how many call centres India and in UK are there altogether? Well, there are innumerable you can choose from, however, firstly let’s check out the meaning of call centre and contact centres:

Contact centre:

A contact centre looks after providing an omni channel customer support service. The customers dependent on these contact centre services expect their service providers to be present on several channels for efficiency. This is not possible with call centre services where the customer can enjoy service only over calls. Alike call centre services, contact centre offers additional benefits like telephone services, email benefits, chat support, etc. The contact centre takes benefit from mathematical models like queuing theory and operations research. This, in turn, solves a variety of problems that customers’ face.

Call centre:

The main channel of coordinating with customers in a call centre is through calls only. Call centres are designed to handle a customer on calls and provide solutions to queries on time. The service is generally used for customer support, help desks and sales. Talking about how call centres are of business interest, they are pro at keeping a check on fraud prevention, collection calls, check on business leads and feedbacks etc. Moreover, there are two types of call centres, which you need to know about, check out below:

On-premise call centres-

This service operates from the office using your internal infrastructure, its hardware and software tools.

Cloud-based call centres-

It is a cloud-based service where the user just need to have a smartphone or PC with internet to handle calls.

Now after discussing the basics on what both these services actually work, here we have the major difference between contact centre and call centre:

Prognostic customer service

With a shift of the world towards digitalization, better predictive and accurate result-driven customer support is easy to ensure. With tools and analytics, the service has transformed from just being limited to answering inbound requests. The enhanced technological tools help the agents know the buyer behavior and this helps to solve their issues even before they occur in contact centre services making them better than call centres.

Automation through IVR

Empowering self-service is again one thing to know about and it is done with automation through IVR. How does an IVR work? Well, it is a digital assistant, which functions through phone by giving vocal prompts. Generally, for an IVR system, it is hard for the call centre agent to coordinate with customers. However, contact centres design their IVRs keeping a check over brand and CX. With this service, the callers’ intention is known automatically by keeping a regular check on her/his behavior. With this, it is easy to solve customer problems and that too without a representative and before the customer asks for its solution. This boosts user-experience.

Single customer view service

Customers that get along your business, share their personal information. With call centre service, where the interaction is over the phone much information of the customers is forgotten after the query is solved. However, the contact centre software assembles the entire customer details at a single profile channel for convenience. This channel is used to offer a predictive and pro-active service to customers using their information. The customer data, solution of issues generated earlier etc. are present on this channel for customers’ efficiency making it better than call centre as it does not provide any such service where all data can be managed from a single platform.

Customer service channels

The biggest difference between contact centre and call centre is the use of different channels for communication. Call centre is all about answering calls over phones, while contact centres also use other mediums like web chat, email, social media channels etc. If your in-house team is not pro at providing customer support, you need to search for a reliable call centre outsourcing partner.

Reliable Customer Experience

Whether its call centre or contact centres, people expect accurate results from both. Customer experience is essential for all companies and having an operative employee training, customer profiling with CX strategy, entities can ensure enriched outcomes to customers. Although in call centres, creating uniformity and maintaining trustworthy results are not possible as the solutions are dealt over calls and there is no database for the same. However, with contact centres, a high-tech network helps to boost services. Even when the customer selects a new channel for communication, the earlier interactions are not erased.

When talking about the difference between contact centre and call centre, lets’ take a glance over the contact centre complaints we came across earlier. Everything has its own pros and cons and so it is for call and contact services.

Criticisms:

Language barriers
Communication lag
Prolonged delays

These complaints are some common ones with contact centres and are the biggest drawback that to some extent is avoided in call centre services. How call centres also face call attrition issues but the stats is consecutively less.

Contact Centre V/S Call Centre: Which is superior?

The main dissimilarity amid the two is of the channel. While call centres answer customer calls over mobiles, contact centres use a customer service channel for effective outputs. In the end, as contact centres have several other features including a channel support, it is way ahead of call centres, and is more efficient for business service. Therefore, contact centre is recommended to businesses, rather than opting for call centres. Customer support service is good when businesses know their target audience and whether they would be feasible with an omnichannel support system or a call centre service. However, in this digitalized world, contact service has all the latest updates, measures to handle your customers effectively, and therefore, is best for service provider firms. If you are a small business, look for a call centre outsourcing provider or a contact centre partner who can be your business guardian angel!

Thanks for reading!

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