Contact Center
What is Contact Center?
An extension of the traditional call center, contact centers, in-office or remote, handle communications between an organization and its customers/prospects/members. These communications were previously limited to phone calls but are increasingly taking place on digital channels, including email, web chat, SMS, messaging, social, and more.
The shift from call center to contact center reflects how customers now choose to communicate. A customer might start in a website chat, follow up by email and finish with a phone call. A contact center brings these channels together with routing, queues, workforce management, reporting and the agent workspace, so the right person or automated service can handle each request with the history of what has already happened.
For buyers, the key questions are how well channels are connected, whether agents can see full context without switching applications, and how self-service and AI fit alongside human agents. Typical measures include resolution rates, customer satisfaction, handle time and service levels by channel. Understanding why customers make contact, and how much of that contact is avoidable failure demand, often reveals the biggest opportunities for improvement.
Related: Call Center, Omnichannel Contact Center, Cloud Contact Center Software, Failure demand.