Contact Center vs Call Center: The Ultimate Comparison
Which will help your business boost customer experience more: A call center or contact center solution? Let’s put them to the test, delving into their definitions, differences, similarities, and software features.
Difference Between
Call Center and Contact Center
| Parameter | Call Center | Contact Center |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | To deliver effective phone-based customer service. | To deliver effective customer service across different channels. |
| Communication channels | A key difference between contact center and call center solutions; call centers focus solely on phone support. | Phone, email, live chat, social media, SMS, and more. |
| Self-Service Capabilities | Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. | Chatbots, self-service knowledge base, community forums, and IVR. |
| Cost | Relatively low cost (especially if you opt for a hosted solution) which is one of the main advantages of call center software. | A higher level of investment compared to call center software. |
| Scalability | Cloud-based call centers offer much better scalability than on-premises solutions. However, scalability of customer support is more limited than a contact center due to staffing limitations (agents can only take one phone call at a time). | Inherently scalable thanks to the adoption of channels that support simultaneous interactions, such as email and live chat. |
| Analytics | Call analytics only. | A wide range of analytics across your touchpoints: Social media analytics, email analytics, chatbot analytics, and call analytics, for example. |
| Best For | Small businesses whose customers have a strong preference for phone calls. | Companies with diverse customer channel preferences who want to deliver exceptional experiences for everyone and have the budget to support those diverse channels. |
| Worst For | Large companies with diverse customer channel preferences. | Businesses that don’t have the budget, agent skills, or customer demand for multiple communication channels. |
What Is a Call Center & How Does It Work?
A call center is a department dedicated to providing customer service over the phone. Call center agents handle inbound calls from customers to address a variety of issues. They can also make outbound calls, such as for outbound sales, fundraising, and marketing.
Calls can be made and received via traditional phone lines or, more commonly, using a hosted call center solution. Hosted call centers house your hardware and infrastructure off-site, and provide advanced features, integrations, and automation.
What Is a Contact Center & How Does It Work?
A contact center delivers customer service across numerous channels, providing broader accessibility to customers. So, as well as telephone support, contact center agents may communicate with customers via email, social media, live chat, SMS, video conferencing, screen sharing, and more.
To achieve this, companies use contact center solutions that centralize all of these communication channels into a single interface. They also use CRM integrations, artificial intelligence, automation, and advanced telephony features.
Call Center vs Contact Center: Which Is Best For Your Business?
In the call center vs contact center debate, it primarily comes down to what channels your company needs to support. And, just as importantly, whether you have the budget and resources to viably support them.
If customers want support via diverse channels, it may make sense making the extra investment for a contact center solution. However, many businesses don’t have the resources for multichannel support, and it’s possible to deliver exceptional customer service purely over the phone.
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Pros and Cons of Call Center and Contact Center
Features
Discover 4 most popular
VoIP features
IVR
Thanks to IVRs, customers no longer need to waste time waiting to be transferred.
Read more about IVR
Skills-Based Routing
Improve inbound calling by routing customers to the best possible agent.
Read more about Skills-Based Routing
Call Monitoring
Let managers and experienced agents join support calls to provide assistance.
Read more about Call Monitoring
Analytics
Centralize all your team’s data and use it to optimize your strategy.
Read more about Analytics
What Are The Similarities Between Call and Contact Centers?
Call centers and contact centers both handle inbound and/or outbound calls. So, they share a primary goal: To deliver high-quality telephone service. To achieve this goal, both departments invest in technologies that give them powerful calling features and automation to optimize the process.
Companies can also operate either a virtual call center or virtual contact center. Both use cloud-based technology to enable agents to answer phone calls remotely, empowering them to work from anywhere.
Which Are Must-Have Features For Call or Contact Center Software?
Whether you set up a contact center or call center, there are some must-have software features. IVR and call routing optimize your customer journeys and streamline operations.
With built-in analytics, you can glean real-time insights into your performance and make improvements based on demand as well as long-term goals. Call monitoring lets supervisors listen in and give advice on live phone calls, and call recording is an invaluable feature for monitoring, training, and compliance.
What real users are saying
The inside scoop from actual CloudTalk customers.
From 20-Minute Waits to 3-Minute Service
“With CloudTalk, we dropped our missed calls from 80% to 16% and cut wait times by over 85%, while scaling from 2 to 20+ agents.”
40% Lift in Call Connections
“With CloudTalk, our pre-sales team stopped wasting time on dropped calls and started having more of the right ones.”
20% More Efficient Call Handling
“We replaced personal phones and manual processes with a scalable VoIP solution and saw a 20% jump in team productivity.”
40% Fewer Missed Calls
“We replaced personal phones and manual processes with a scalable VoIP solution and saw a 20% jump in team productivity.”
From 3 Phone Systems to One Source of Truth
“Before CloudTalk, our data was scattered. Now, everything lives in HubSpot — connected, visible, and fully unified.”
66% More Capacity Without Hiring
“CloudTalk made it easy to scale support fast: we cut handle time by 33% and now handle 66% more calls per agent.”
Frequently asked questions
A key thing to consider is call and contact center pricing. Setting up a contact center is typically more expensive than setting up a call center, so you’ll need to evaluate which option is the most viable for your budget.
Next, consider your specific customer service needs in alignment with your business goals. Identify what channels your customers prefer and whether your current agents have the skill sets required to use these channels effectively. And, lastly, consider what must-have features you need in your solution.
Both call and contact center agents will need to brush up on their call center terminology and telephone skills. However, contact vs call center training is generally differentiated by the communication channels involved.
Call center training focuses exclusively on helping agents perfect their telephone customer service. As well as communication skills, it teaches agents how to navigate the call center software and use its features efficiently.
Contact center training educates agents on how to use a variety of communication channels to provide support, such as social media, live chat, and video.
This requires more in-depth training. Agents must be able to navigate each channel efficiently and communicate with the appropriate etiquette. Plus, they may need to hone your agents’ multi-tasking skills so they’re able to switch between channels and hold multiple conversations at once.
Research by Statista reports that the top three customer service channels used by customers are email (64%), web/application chat (47%), and social media (36%). Phone calls come in fourth at 30%, which makes the case for contact centers.
That said, phone calls still reign supreme as the most effective customer service channel. Salesforce discovered that 77% of companies have adopted phone calls into their customer service strategy and report it to be the best method for handling complex issues. That’s due to its live, familiar medium, which suggests that call centers are still central to customer needs.
An omnichannel contact center handles high volumes of customer and prospect interactions across multiple different channels. Unlike a multichannel contact center, where each channel exists separately, an omnichannel contact center syncs customer data and customer service interactions in real-time.
So, from one unified platform, agents can see past customer interactions and gain conversational context to provide fast, seamless, and personalized experiences.
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