Most of the businesses are moving to the digital world. To provide great customer support, call centers play an important role. In call centers, customers can only interact with businesses through the phone. Dedicated customer support agents are assigned to handle customer queries through phone lines.
The call center is the most traditional mode of customer service because of single channel support. Today call center agents interact with customers through multiple channels of communication.
The basic difference between a contact center and a call center is the multiple channels of communication. Call centers focus only on phone communication. In contrast to the call centers, contact centers provide customers an effective and interactive customer experience without any hassle through multiple channels of communication.
The ultimate goal of the customer experience is to improve the loyalty of customers and to provide them a comprehensive experience.
“Studies have shown that Customer retention is harder than Customer Acquisition”
Key Differences:
Over the years, customer expectations have increased exponentially. Customers demand quick, effective and interactive modes of communication. Businesses offering multiple ways of communication have more acceptance in the market.
Improved ways to connect, provide customers a satisfying experience which encourages them to communicate more often. The latest features also enable customer service organizations to perform and offer functionalities that were not previously feasible.
Call center evolution brought the following changes to the industry.
Before contact centers, customers used to contact businesses only by the telephone. Whenever they had something to inquire about, they would contact customer support agents through a dedicated phone line to resolve their issue. This system provides customers very limited (single channel) access.
This is where contact centers come in for the rescue. Customers can easily contact customer support through multiple channels including phone, email, chat, SMS, social media and more. Most of the organizations now also offer the self-service capability to help customers attain a maximum level of support and resolve their issues as quickly as possible even after the business hours.
Customer Centric Features: –
Businesses have made their services more customer-centric. From the first-contact resolution to the most comprehensive customer experience. Customers concerns are addressed quickly and effectively. Studies have shown that businesses using contact centers have gained great customer acceptance and satisfaction as compared to traditional call centers. Customer support agents are now more empowered and always within the reach of customers through all possible communication channels.
Customer queries are intelligently directed towards the most appropriate agents for faster and quick resolution regardless of the channel being used. This ‘skill-based routing feature’ enables customer support teams to provide effective and faster response to the customers which enable higher customer satisfaction and ultimately higher customer experience.
Powers to utilize data: –
In the past, customer service organizations used to process data but the data was coming from a limited number of sources so lack of diversity in the data kept them from utilizing the data in a more comprehensive way.
But with the implementation of contact center solutions, businesses are now more empowered than ever before. They can utilize the data collected from multiple different sources. The contact centers enable managers to take comprehensive actions on the information gathered from different sources to analyze customer interactions and plan strategies for the future.
The transformation of the call centers to the customer experience centers have paved a path for upcoming developments. Most of the businesses have implemented intelligent contact center solutions to empower their customer support teams and to ultimately enhance their customer experience.
Do you want to transform your business and enhance your customer experience, contact us for a free consultation. The industry experts will guide you through the process.
