It is always helpful to go back to the basics and reinforce the foundation of your knowledge and it is never too late to to that. "Call Center" and "Contact Center" are two terminologies that we use interchangeably during our conversation with our peers or customers, despite of the huge difference between them.
Lets analyze the following two discussions which I found during my search on the internet: -
Many people tend to think of a call center as people neatly organized into rows, sitting beside their phones, answering customer calls. So what is a contact center?
Contact centers are more than headset-wearing switch-board operators. The modern contact center handles phone calls, email, and online communication – including instant messaging.
Traditionally, contact centers have been called call centers. The newer name – contact center – reflects the fact that more than just phone calls are being handled. Many call centers have evolved over the years to do much more than just answer phones.
Some companies choose to separate the handling of customer contacts by medium. For instance, a company may establish a department for inbound calls, one for outbound calls, and a group for email. Some companies, especially smaller ones, opt to create “universal agents” who handle all contact types. Companies create universal contact agents for reasons of efficiency and service, and often because they find it easier to train agents in multiple communication methods than to train multiple agents in product or service information.
Bottom line, it’s up to the customer to decide how they want to communicate with your company, and it’s up to your company to respond appropriately through its contact center.Source: Avaya Call Center vs. Contact Center
A call center is solely voice focused. Call center agents will answer phone calls from customers, partners, internal employees, or anyone else trying to reach the company. A contact center, on the other hand, answers voice calls but also has multi-channel capabilities. Agents have the training and technology support to answer phones, chats, web-based calls (VoIP) and emails. Contact centers are also referred to as “web-enabled call center” or a “customer interaction center”. In everyday conversation, call and contact are used synonymously. However, essentially, a call center is part of a contact center.
With today’s technologies, it is essential that call center become web enabled and evolve into contact center. We are in an industry that is so attached to the word “call center” even though clients may require more than just voice support.
Even though many clients call still call us a call center, we are multi-channel and can do much more than just answer phone calls. Think of joining a fitness center and only using the weight machines “(i.e. the call center portion), but you have access to the swimming pool and squash court too!
Source: Contact Center Blog "Contact Center" versus "Call Center"In my view, the Contact Center is a much broader term as compared to Call Center, which encompasses the overall customers communications/interactions using multiple-channels. A multi-channel Contact Center is capable of handling inbound/outbound calls, webchat, email, voicemail, SMS, Fax etc.
Whereas, the Call Center is comparatively a narrow term which limits itself to handling of incoming/outgoing calls only.
In the upcoming posts, I will elaborate upon Importance of Contact Center and How Contact Center Outsourcing can help organizations focus on their core business and avoid capital expenditure.
