What is the difference between customer service and call center

Software Categories. Who We Are. For Vendors Write a Review. Differences between call centers and contact centers via source Operational costs: call centers vs. Tips for managers One of the best ways to save on operational costs? Automate what you can. Differences between call centers and contact centers Hiring and training: call centers vs. Automate what you can to lower operational costs AI software can help you automate live chat conversations, while call center software with IVR can help your phone agents save time.

Looking for Customer Service software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Customer Service software solutions.

Tags: call center vs contact center. About the Author. Cathy Reisenwitz Cathy Reisenwitz is a former Capterra analyst. Comments No comments yet. Be the first! Comment Guidelines: All comments are moderated before publication and must meet our guidelines. Comments must be substantive, professional, and avoid self promotion. Moderators use discretion when approving comments. Something that crosses both functions is the necessity for secure business continuity options. The global pandemic has proven that neither call centers nor contact centers can rely on traditional on-premise offices.

They need reliable and secure solutions allowing their staff to work remotely. As a result, cloud contact centers and virtual call center solutions have sky-rocketed in popularity. Leading cloud contact center provider, Amazon Connect, onboarded over 5, new contact centers in March and April alone as many businesses experienced an exponential increase in call volume.

Beyond the key differences outlined here, there are many other factors for businesses to consider when deciding whether a call center or contact center is best suited to their needs. These include skills-based routing, automation, software consolidation and CRM integration. Businesses must also consider how the customer service solution they choose will drive them towards the future.

Getting caught in the trap of outdated and expensive infrastructure will only result in tacking on disparate solutions which silo information and make the agent experience more cumbersome.

Businesses must consider what customers want and employees need. By making a contextual, future-proof decision, businesses can keep their customer service operations scalable, their costs minimal, and the customer experience exceptional. Call centers are very data driven and there's no shortage of KPIs to measure.

By contrast, a contact center may provide phone support most of them do , but they also support other channels. Contact centers who have integrated all of their channels are able to provide omnichannel experiences, meaning customers can move seamlessly across channels during the same interaction.

If contact centers don't integrate their channels, they provide multichannel, as opposed to omnichannel, support. Assuming a contact center handles phone calls, all the typical call center metrics, types of inquiries, etc.

However, because they offer additional channels, contact centers also have additional metrics, technology, training needs, and more. Contact center agents can and should be trained to handle contacts from multiple channels, giving managers more staffing flexibility. The simple answer: customers expect and value it. Just think about how you, your kids, or your friends interact with the world. You might make a phone call when you want to talk to your mom, post a picture on Facebook when you want to broadcast to large groups of friends, email your son's teacher about his history grade, and text your best friend about the great book you just finished.

You choose the communication method that best suits the particular circumstance. This ability to choose how we communicate has become ingrained in us now. People bring these now ingrained habits and preferences to their business relationships. When they interact with companies, they want to be able to choose a communication method that fits the urgency and nature of the issue. For urgent matters that don't require a lot of detail sharing, chat is a great solution. A customer who doesn't need an immediate resolution and wants to send pictures of a damaged product might choose to email the business.

One-size-fits-all phone-only support is really not in sync with our modern society. Simply stated, people want options. The study found that agent-assisted methods are still preferred over self-service.

Preferences are similarly divided. Phone support is still top dog but chat and email aren't far behind and they're gaining ground. When organizations begin to evolve their call centers into contact centers, it's often part of a larger digital transformation strategy. At the same time, businesses now recognize the important role call and contact centers play in delivering exceptional CX. Customer service contacts are a part of the customer journey that can increase loyalty…or increase churn. Given customer support's now elevated status, many businesses are making the infrastructure investments required to transform their call centers into contact centers.

It's a significant undertaking and what follows are some of the areas that are included in the transformation.

When an organization begins offering multiple channels and transforms from a call center to a contact center, the decision impacts just about every aspect of the operation. Here are some examples. Agents who support digital channels still need to have empathy, initiative and great problem-solving skills, just like their phone-only counterparts.

But they need additional skills to support written and sometimes public communications. Plus, the asynchronous nature of channels like email and private social messaging might mean they have several contacts in process at the same time and therefore need the ability to multi-task, something their phone-only peers don't have to contend with.

Here are some examples of additional skills contact center agents may need. More info: For ideas about teaching people to multi-task, read our blog post, Training Contact Center Agents to Multitask. When an operation supports digital channels, naturally they need software to receive, route, respond to, and report on those digital contacts.

Contact centers may also implement tools to automate some of the core processes, such as forecasting and scheduling, that have become more complex with the addition of more channels.

Below is a discussion of possible technology differences between call centers and contact centers. Another difference between call centers and contact centers is the KPIs they measure. If they handle phone calls, contact centers likely monitor all the stats that call centers do. However, they have to expand their KPIs to include metrics about their other channels.

This may include standard call metrics with a digital flare, or completely new metrics that reflect the uniqueness of digital channels. But what about differences in outcomes? Isn't that what it's all about? Contact centers exist because organizations want to meet their customers' demands for more channel choice. We would expect to see a bump in customer satisfaction, but there are also implications for agent satisfaction.

Below is a discussion. While it's hard to say that contact centers definitely provide better CX than call centers, it is clear that consumers like digital channels.

Additionally, it's also clear that organizations need to direct more effort towards delivering the omnichannel experiences customers expect. These are some of the more significant differences between call centers and contact centers. Driven by the additional channels they support, contact centers have different capabilities and the infrastructure and processes to support them.

Contact centers aren't necessarily better than call centers, but the fact that they offer digital channels does position organizations to better compete in the experience economy. One more parting thought - as organizations embrace digital service, sometimes pockets of support spring up outside of the contact center.