A contact center is a valuable tool for customer service. Today’s contact center technology enables agents to make outbound sales calls, send automated SMS for marketing, embed live chat and chatbots into your website, and more–all from one dashboard. And in today’s world, strong customer service is key–which is why the omnichannel market is expected to grow at 13.6% annually through 2030.
This article will cover everything you need to know about contact centers, including features, benefits, use cases, and best practices for implementation.
What is a Contact Center?
A contact center is a branch of your company that handles customer service through multiple communication channels: phone, SMS texting, web chat, email, social media, and video. One or more agents use contact center software to communicate with customers for support, sales, or other communication needs.
Contact center software bundles communication channels with call routing menus, customer self-service capabilities, analytics, call monitoring, and AI-based agent support.
How Do Companies Use Contact Centers?
Companies use contact center technology to provide customer service through multiple communication channels, including self-service chatbots and virtual agents on your website or app. Contact centers support customer service, sales efforts, and internal company communication.
Customers can call or message you for support, billing questions, to create an appointment, make a payment, or check an order’s status. The agent desktop organizes all channels and displays customer information like recent purchases, to help agents provide better service. Outbound auto dialers and proactive communication workflows support sales campaigns and marketing promotions. Essentially, companies use contact centers to organize and streamline customer communications.
Contact Center vs Call Center: What’s The Difference?
Call centers provide service via phone only, while contact centers use multiple communication channels: not just voice but email, web chat, video, SMS, and social media messaging.
Until around 2010, most companies offered support via telephone only. However, smartphones and web adoption normalized customers reaching companies through multiple touchpoints, as the percentage of the population owning a smartphone nearly quadrupled between 2010 and 2020.
Contact centers let you automate self-service from your website or SMS, providing rich services and triggering proactive outreach. Customers can reach you through the touchpoint of their choosing, and the CCaaS dashboard lets agents respond to any query on any channel.
| Contact Center | Call Center | |
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| Cost | $100-$250 monthly per user | $50-$150 monthly per user |
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Learn more: Contact Center vs Call Center: Differences & Similarities
Types of Contact Centers
There are several different types of contact centers, varying by communication channels and cloud setup.
Inbound
Inbound contact centers only handle incoming customer inquiries. These are typically call centers providing customer support over the phone. As such, inbound call centers are typically voice-only, rather than multichannel or omnichannel.
Outbound
An outbound contact center only places outbound communications and cannot receive inbound calls. These are typically call centers, although outbound contact centers may also utilize email or SMS.
Blended
A blended contact center combines inbound and outbound service. Blended centers can receive calls from customers or place outbound phone calls. These can be phone-only call centers, or contact centers with email, web chat, SMS, phone, and social media messaging.
On-Premises
With an on-premises contact center, the company hosts the entire communication infrastructure onsite in the office. The company manages and maintains all the equipment–phone system, landline connections, SIP trunk, servers and data storage, computers, etc.
Cloud/Virtual
Cloud-hosted contact centers, or virtual contact centers, are software-based and hosted by the provider. This type of infrastructure is also called contact center as a service (CCaaS). It’s the most common type of infrastructure for today’s contact centers.
Companies pay for a cloud contact center by subscribing to the provider’s service monthly.
Omnichannel
An omnichannel contact center unifies all of a customer’s interactions with your company, across all channels, into a cohesive picture of the customer journey. Customers can contact you on any touchpoint–voice, web chat, SMS–and the omnichannel software automatically unifies it into a cohesive interaction history.
Multichannel
A multichannel contact center offers multiple communication channels but does not unify them. While an omnichannel contact center unifies all channels into a singular customer journey, multichannel contact center software initiates a new contact log every time a customer contacts the company.
Contact Center Essential Features & Technologies
Contact center software includes dozens of features and capabilities that enhance customer service and reduce wait times. These include multichannel routing and self-service tools, which reduce wait times and make your agents more efficient. AI support, analytics, and call monitoring help supervisors identify insights and trends about your customers.
Let’s look at some features you should consider for your contact center.
Communication Channels
A contact center can include one, multiple, or all of these channels:
- Voice
- SMS texting
- Web chat
- Video meetings
- Social media and social media messaging
Providers typically offer voice-only plans, digital-only plans with all the messaging channels, and blended plans with everything.
User Dashboard and Interface
The contact center’s agent dashboard organizes all channels, features, and tasks.
Agents can switch between channels, monitor their call queue, view relevant CRM information, and transfer calls in moments. With an AI-based CCaaS system, the dashboard offers real-time guidance and suggestions during calls.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
An IVR menu is a self-service phone greeting that gives callers options for which department to reach. You can design the menu’s message, submenu, and where each number leads. This automated tool reduces your need for live-agent receptionists.
Since 86% of customers still prefer to contact customer support via phone, having a main call routing menu for your company is important.
Self-Service Chatbots and Virtual Agents
Build automated, 24/7 self-service chatbots that interact with customers across messaging channels like web chat, SMS, and social media. Advanced chatbots provide rich services like secure payments, appointment booking, making reservations, answering customer questions, and updating customer account information.
Embed these services directly into your website or mobile app with web chat.
Call Queues
Call queues organize inbound calls on hold in the order they were received. You can create call queues for departments or individual agents, who can see how many callers are waiting and the average wait time. Most contact centers let you automate callbacks, so customers can hang up and receive a call when it’s their turn.
Supervisors can see queue statuses and wait times, assigning agents as needed or jumping in to help. Call queues help organize calls, keep agents on track, and reduce wait times.
Reporting and Analytics
Contact center analytics and reports display metrics and KPIs tracking customer service level and trends. In the analytics portal, supervisors can view data about agent performance, call activity, channel usage, and call quality over custom timeframes.
Capabilities like analytics and customer insights help companies separate themselves from competitors, as customer service innovators are 2.7x more likely to invest in analytics.
AI Features and Agent Support
AI call centers provide conversation analysis to identify customer satisfaction scores, agent service level, commonly used keywords, and more. Supervisors can revisit call transcripts with highlights and key moments, to drill down into agent performance and improve feedback.
Real-time coaching supports live agents with response suggestions, scripts, promotions, and relevant knowledge base articles. AI features are generally included in a provider’s most expensive high-tier plans.
Call and Interaction Monitoring
Call monitoring dashboards let supervisors observe and manage agent performance in real time. Managers can see call queues and agent activity, with the option to “listen, whisper, or barge” into calls as needed to help live agents.
Contact Center Benefits
Using a multichannel or omnichannel contact center leads to greater customer convenience, quicker service, deeper customer insights, and better data about agent performance.
Here are some of the key benefits of a contact center:
- Customer convenience
- Reduced staffing needs
- Lower costs
- Scalability
- Improved agent performance
- Customer data
Customer Convenience
A multichannel contact center lets your customers reach you anytime through the channel most convenient for them, including your website and app. With chatbots and rich services, customers don’t have to speak with a real human unless they want to.
This flexibility is crucial to the younger generations, 87% of whom highly value convenience.
Reduced Staffing Needs
Contact centers automate and support most agent tasks. Virtual agents and IVR menus can answer questions, route calls and tasks, and more.
AI-assisted chatbots can provide rich services like booking appointments, facilitating transactions, and retrieving customer data, replacing tasks previously done by agents. In fact, AI is expected to reduce customer support staffing needs 20-30% by 2026.
Lower Costs
Hosted contact center software is often cheaper than an on-premise call center that uses landline. A landline call center requires frequent hardware updates and maintenance, plus the cost of IT staff to upkeep the equipment.
Hosted contact center software subscriptions cost between $75 and $250 monthly per user, with no additional maintenance or hardware required. Gartner expects conversational AI to reduce labor costs by $80 billion dollars in 2026, and AI-assisted contact centers will play a major role in that.
Scalability
Cloud-based contact center software makes it easy to add and remove users, who can handle call center duties wherever they have an internet connection. Administrators purchase virtual phone numbers and subscriptions online in minutes, inviting new staff via email.
Improved Agent Performance
Omnichannel dashboards, real-time AI support, and CRM integrations empower agents with more information to provide better service. AI-based coaching, customer satisfaction detection, and call monitoring enable supervisors to give more feedback, helping agents improve.
Customer Data
Contact center software tracks every interaction to analyze trends in call volume, channel usage, and agent performance. Higher-tier plans use AI for call transcription and conversation analysis, identifying customer satisfaction, keyword usage, and interaction highlights.
These insights help supervisors coach agents, understand customers better, and capitalize on the channels your audience uses most.
Contact Center Use Cases
In general, contact centers work for any customer communication use case. This includes industries like healthcare, retail, education, finance, and many more. Companies use contact centers for customer support, sales, marketing, and proactive outreach.
Customer Support
A contact center supports all types of customer service. Multiple communication channels like voice, social media, live chat, email, and SMS enable your agents to serve customers on the platform of their choice.
Call queues and IVR split agents into as many departments as necessary, to provide different customer-service branches like technical support, billing, order status, etc. CRM integrations, sentiment scores, and interaction analytics provide insights about customer experience, helping teams refine their service strategy.
Sales
A contact center’s communication channels, workflow automations, and outbound dialing tools streamline and automate sales efforts. Agents can schedule automated emails, trigger bulk texts, and automate surveys to understand customer attitudes. Outbound auto-dialers link with your CRM system to automate call campaigns from a list
AI-based tools analyze transcripts and customer behavior to segment leads, helping sales teams develop stronger prospects.
Self-Service
Call center software enables customer self-service across all channels. Automated tools like virtual agents and chatbots are highly conversational, answering questions and routing inbound customers. IVR menus route calls with skills-based distribution, ensuring customers reach the right agent.
Rich Services
Chatbots and live agents can provide rich services like secure payment processing, appointment booking, reservation scheduling, and more. CCaaS software connects with third-party software like CRM systems, Shopify, and inventory databases to sync your data with the agent dashboard.
Proactive Outreach and Marketing
Create workflow automations like welcome emails, bulk texts for promotions, appointment reminders, payment confirmation emails, receipts and invoices, and follow-up surveys. Contact center software lets you build these automations in a low-code setup, combining triggers across third-party apps.
These automations strengthen customer relationships, gather customer insight, provide marketing, and support sales efforts.
Contact Center Best Practices
When building and growing your contact center, start slowly with channels and features. As you grow, leverage chat-based self-service to increase agent efficiency. While AI tools and CRM integrations aren’t essential, we recommend them as a way to stand out with above-average customer service.
Here are a few tips to optimize your customer service with a contact center:
- Start slowly with features: Depending on your experience with contact center software, we recommend starting with a lower-tier plan with a manageable number of features. Once your agents feel comfortable with the software, you can easily upgrade to a higher-tier plan.
- Take advantage of self-service tools: Multichannel routing and customer self-service tools save your agents tons of time. As you begin, focus on tools like queues and IVR to organize inbound calls. Next, focus on building efficient chatbots, to keep your costs low and agents efficient.
- Focus on just a few analytics: Whatever analytics are included in your plan, take the time to thoroughly learn the metrics available to you, and choose several that you plan to follow closely. For the first few months, make adjustments to optimize just these KPIs.
- Integrate with a CRM system: To get the most out of your contact center, integrate it with a CRM system like HubSpot or Salesforce. The user data syncs seamlessly, making CRMs a great way to optimize the ROI for your contact center.
- Use AI to help agents improve: Once the above steps are in place, integrate AI tools for live agent support and coaching. Capabilities like real-time assistance and auto-generated interaction summaries save agents time, and coach new hires. Call transcriptions and AI-based scheduling help supervisors evaluate and schedule agents.
Learn more: Call Center Management Best Practices, Dos and Don’ts
Should Your Business Use a Call Center or a Contact Center?
Call centers and contact centers both offer effective ways to boost customer service, but the best option for your business depends on your size, budget, and the way you’d like to connect with customers.
- Who should use a contact center: In general, contact centers work best if you want to engage your customers through your website or digital channels. These options provide strong self-service and customer convenience, which is especially important to younger audiences.
- Who should use a call center: Voice is still at the heart of customer service, as 76% of customers prefer to contact customer support via phone. A call center works best for teams just beginning with a customer-service solution, or those who want to start slow with a single channel before building to a larger omnichannel approach.
