A contact centre is where a company keeps in contact with its customers through all available customer service channels.
Unlike call centres, which focus on inbound and outbound calls alone, the contact centre focuses on the entire communication experience. This includes calls, social media, leveraging technology for self-service, a more engaging customer service experience and an overall brand projection during communication.
In short, a contact centre has all customer communications covered.
What is the difference between a call centre and a contact centre?
Traditionally, call centres were born from the need for organisations to attend to their clients’ requests, complaints, and claims in a cost-effective way. However, as time passed, the need for companies to have more robust customer service increased.
Due to the evolution of technology —social media, multiple communication channels and improvement in communication devices— traditional call centres were not enough to accommodate the increasing communications demand.
In this sense, it is safe to say that the contact centre is, by definition, the evolution of the traditional call centre.
Contact centres added more functionalities compared to traditional call centres. On the one hand, the call centre focuses solely on telephone communication. Meanwhile, the contact center integrates all customer service channels, including telephone, chat, social networks, SMS, and video used to stay in contact with clients.
Additionally, a contact centre integrates new technologies such as text-to-speech, chatbots, speech analytics, big data and gamification, among others. These new technologies aim to increase the productivity of any task that you want to perform and create better service experiences for customers and users.
Contact centre for 21st-century customers
The contact centre has become the nucleus of companies. The development of the fast-paced 21st century has demanded that customers receive immediate attention through multiple communication channels.
Also, marketing has become more competitive and fast-paced, so companies’ adoption of contact centres has helped improve the quality of customer experience. In turn, this encourages a good image of the brand, customer loyalty and, of course, improves sales.
Customers who are satisfied with the care they receive often refer others to a certain brand due to an exceptional customer service experience. Research has shown that 90% of customers who had a bad customer experience will leave without informing you of their reason in any way.
Why contact centres are better for customer service
Some companies prefer to have their customer service in-house instead of outsourcing it to a specialised contact centre. Generally, this is to save cost or have control, etc. However, the advantages of outsourcing far outweigh the disadvantages.
Here are the top advantages of using a contact centre:
The implementation of new and better voice and information portals.
Specialised contact centres usually integrate all customer communication channels; through the implementation of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) technology. This helps them to synchronise information across channels and makes communication a lot easier and more effective. Additionally, CTI is a huge cost saver for companies.
Predictive and proactive.
Using new tools and the latest technology, contact centres can watch buyer behaviour, predict actions and possibly reach out to answer a question before it’s even been asked by the customer.
Even though traditional call centres may want to implement this, it will be quite difficult because, apart from the limitation in data collection technology, the call centre can only place a phone call to the customer, which has proved to be very ineffective. Many people are wary of unknown phone numbers.
Contact centres open multiple channels for customers to reach them and vice versa.
This aids proactive communication, which increases customer engagement and loyalty.
Personalised customer profiles during communication.
This allows the customer to feel important and connected to the brand. Although call centres can do this manually, this is usually strenuous and largely ineffective. The use of digitalised channels by contact centres makes it easy, seamless and less time-consuming.
More engaging due to well-trained customer service representatives.
These representatives dedicate time to learn the craft and also learn about your company. Representatives are specially trained in the skill and technique of customer service engagement. They also spend time following up and getting feedback to ensure customer satisfaction.
Indeed, many world-class companies use contact centres to interact with their customers. Moreover, many businesses use contact centres to develop their internal functions, including help desk and sales support.
What does the customer expect from contact centres?
To generate trust among each client in contact centres, the attention must be friendly and formal enough.
The staff must also convince customers to remain loyal to the organisation, obtain new services or products and stay in contact with them. For this reason, it is essential to listen carefully without stopping the communication.
Every call to answer represents a challenge, so reliable tools must offer state-of-the-art and quality care. Innovative tools can avoid communication interruptions and generate customer satisfaction.
Wrapping up
Today the telephone channel is still the most relevant. However, new digital channels are gaining strength every day, and even more so among younger customers who are more familiar with social media and smartphone technology. Contrary to what you might think, there has never been a better time to implement a business strategy based on a contact centre, and no matter what stage of implementation or adoption your company or business is in, there is always room for further enhancing the service offered to your customers whilst taking away the challenge of dealing with enquires.
