Difference of Call Center & Contact Center
Understand the distinction between call centers and contact centers. Learn about their features, capabilities.
What is a Call Center?
A call center is a department that handles incoming and outgoing phone calls from both new and existing customers. In the call center, communication is established only over the phone, and calls are managed. It also saves call records (according to legal compliance) and provides call recording security. For this reason, calls are not only used for customer technical support. In addition, call center departments have functions such as providing process inquiries, cold calling, or market research.
The Features of Call Centers
Telemarketing
Telemarketing is the marketing of goods or services to customers or potential customers by direct communication via telephone, internet, or fax. Today, due to the development of technology, telemarking cannot be done only by communicating with a call. In addition, it includes video conference calls. But direct mail and face-to-face meetings are not part of telemarketing. Telemarketing is done in the form of Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B).
- Maintaining and growing an existing customer base
- Communicate with potential customers – make an appointment
- Inform about campaigns
- To be in constant contact with the customer
- Receive feedback by creating a customer satisfaction survey
- Segment their customers based on their purchasing behavior or feedback.
Telemarketing and Tele-sales are often confused by people. Tele-sales just aim to sell. Telemarketing is not about making sales. Telemarketing purposes are:
Customer Support
Customer Support is a department of a company that helps its customers use products and services. It aims to help customers who need special support by focusing on problems and solutions. They apply when there is a technical problem with the company’s products and services or when they have difficulty using the product or service. That’s why the customer support of technology companies is also called “technical service” among the people.,
Customer Support can take place through multiple channels, including face-to-face, phone, email, or live chat. Development of technology, easier communication, remote monitoring of the solution process and remote management of software systems, customer support through call centers has gradually increased in use and efficiency.
Measuring Team Performance
Every day, customers are contacted by call centers in many ways and feedbacks is received on many issues. Companies measure team performance by analyzing this feedback. To measure team performance, evaluations are made on many different issues such as customer satisfaction, solution adequacy, call quality, satisfaction with the forwarded unit, service level, average processing time, and abandonment rate.
As a result of the surveys made after the calls made to the customers or the forms sent, a measurement value is obtained and these values are classified according to their subjects and questions. By collecting each of these data, an overall result is obtained and team performance is measured according to this overall result.
Cloud-Based Call Centers
The Cloud Call Center is a web-accessible platform for managing customer calls and interactions. The reason for the emergence of the Cloud Call Center is that with the developing technology, customers can now communicate through more than one channel. For example, using email, live chat, social media, and text. Therefore, it was necessary to combine and manage many different channels from a single source. We can say that a cloud call center is a combination of a traditional call center and a voice and digital environment.
A cloud call center is a provider’s network-based business with call center technology. Thus, it offers its services to businesses with a remote subscription model. In other words, we can say that the cloud call center is a combination of a traditional call center and a voice and digital environment. Cloud Call Center is integrated with much different software and adapts to every sector.
What is a Contact Center?
Today, there are many ways of communication other than calling. Contact Center provides technical support via in-app chat (live support) or video. If there is a demand or for any other reason, live support can direct the customer to a representative such as contacting by phone. Order status updates can be sent via SMS or notifications via applications. Email marketing can be done, the customer profile can be matched via email and the customer can observe the company via email. (such as e-invoice, cargo tracking). It is sent directly to a representative to connect by phone. Contact Center provides management of such and many transactions. In other words, it provides the management of communication networks provided over the Internet.
The Features of Contact Center
ACD (Automated Call Distrubition)
ACD stands for Automatic Call Distribution. ACD is a telecommunications technology that routes all incoming calls to specific departments or agents within the organization. Especially if there are a lot of incoming calls, if the person is busy, it automatically organizes them by sorting and forwarding. In addition, it organizes the incoming call according to many factors determined by the company such as working hours, call traffic, customer’s past interactions, behavioral transactions, and makes customer-representative matching
As the name suggests, it first appeared to manage calls. However, with the development of technology, it is no longer used only for routing phone calls. They are capable of routing customer inquiries received via email, messaging, web chat, social media, and other digital channels and enable increasingly complex multi-channel management. In other words, ACD has become integrated with conduct centers.
Integrations
Today, as a new communication channel is added to contact centers, it becomes more complex. For this situation, companies use integrations. Integrations are made with and between different systems and channels and manage this complex communication network and information system. Integrations aim to improve both customer and agency experience, improve internal processes, automate business processes, organize customer data and grow business. For this reason, companies need to consider the integration possibilities of the software. The most popular contact center software is CRM and BI systems. It easily integrates with the Contact Center and provides customized solutions when needed.
Advanced Reporting System
The advanced reporting system is a kind of software that covers various features. It enables data to become documents by applying conditional formatting to the specific needs of companies and managers. In other words, advanced reporting creates customized reports that fit businesses’ needs. You can use these reports for a variety of different purposes.
Identifying specific demographics, grouping data, creating custom calculations, comparing sales or performance with competitors, etc…In addition, reporting systems make information easier to understand by analyzing data, creating tables, converting them into graphs, and summarizing and visualizing information. Without advanced reporting systems, it is very difficult to make a comprehensive analysis of your data, without forgetting any data and taking all of it into account. For this reason, the Advanced Reporting system is very important.
The Differences of Call Center and Contact Center
If we need to focus on The Differences of Call Center and Contact Center; the Call center, as the name suggests, focuses on calls. A call center is phone-based. Thus, it serves through a single channel. That’s why it’s traditional. It handles incoming calls, handles outgoing calls, and manages the phone channel. By focusing only on phone calls, attention is paid to criteria such as Average Response Rate (ASA) and Average Processing Time (AHT). But the contact center manages many communication channels such as messaging, phone, applications, text, e-mail, social media and video conferencing, live support, apart from calling. For this reason, they manage and serve many channels at the same time.
Contact Center, on the other hand, is more adapted to today’s conditions by being integrated with SaaS systems, especially with the development of technology. In other words, it provides a centralized system for keeping in touch with more customers and managing their multi-channel strategies compared to the call center. Because Contact Center can serve multiple communication channels at the same time, it can manage multiple customer conversations, thus increasing their productivity and reducing the need for more agents. For this reason, the cost rate is lower. They pay attention to criteria such as Contact Center, Average Time in Queue and Average Abandonment Rates, and Customer Satisfaction scores (CSAT) in general.
Conclusion
In summary, we need to know the differences of call center and contact center concepts. the call center has existed before. That’s why it’s traditional. They only work for phone and voice communication. Responsible for managing these calls or forwarding them to the relevant person & department. On the other hand, Contact Center has emerged with the development of technology and is gradually developing and becoming more complex. It covers all channels, including emerging communication channels. They are also software compatible and there are many kinds of Integrations ( like our product Hipcall ). It can perform marketing and sales with both centers. They have common purposes, but their usage areas are different.
If you want to learn more about call center and related issues, you can take a look at our other blog posts.
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