Contact Centre

“Thank you for contacting our contact centre. We are currently experiencing high call volumes, but the next available agent will be with you as soon as possible. Please hold.” Sound familiar? It was once a rite of passage for every consumer to enquire and engage with a business through phone calls, as this was the main (and only) way to reach a brand remotely.

At their peak, call centres hold a gold standard for customer service as they assist customers with clear and specific solutions within minutes. At their worst, however, call centres can foster poor customer service due to long customer waiting times, inefficient solution solving, and frustrating calling processes. This can quickly dent your brand’s image among its customers, as speed is the number one driver for achieving customer satisfaction (The Future of CX). So what do you do if this is the only way customers can contact your business?

You can first ensure you optimise your call centre, so it runs efficiently and engages well with your customers. This, however, does not accommodate for the changing consumer who now has many channel options from which they can engage with people, and of course, businesses. Thus, the best way to cater to all your customers in terms of engagement is to ensure they can communicate with you (and vice versa) on their preferred platform(s). Of course, this means your business will need to be present on multiple platforms and manage them all simultaneously. It does sound like an overly tedious process to adopt this communication strategy, but it is simpler with Contact Centres.

Understanding Contact Centres

Since the technological boom, new and emerging communication methods and platforms come about daily. This makes it rather challenging to stay on top of all the channels your customers use, but Contact Centres exist so to ease this process.

A Contact Centre is a solution that oversees a business’s customer service and communications across various channels. The channels that Contact Centres manage communication through include, for instance:

  • Voice Call
  • VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
  • SMS
  • Email
  • Social Media
  • Live chat
  • Chatbots

The omnichannel feature of Contact Centres generally allows businesses to provide consumers with convenient ways to interact with them. As the business becomes more reachable through different channels, it also motivates consumers and makes it easier for them to increase their engagement with the brand.

Contact Centres also automate processes and data collection. Thus, businesses can collect more customer data that they can pull real, actionable insights from.

Contact Centre vs Call Centre

Call centres and Contact Centres are communication solutions that are both built on the premise of providing effective customer service for businesses. The main difference between the two, however, is one manages a single channel while the other manages multiple. As a result, these centres also share other differences in relation to data collection, customer self-service (CSS) features, technology, and necessary agent skills. To illustrate, look at the table below:

 

Contact Centre

Call Centre

Channels

Omnichannel

Single channel (Phone)

Data Collection

Via multiple platforms

Over the phone

CSS

IVR, FAQ webpages, chatbots

Interactive voice response (IVR)

Technology

All Call Centre skills plus email/social media response management, omnichannel routing

IVR, workforce management systems, speech analysis software

Agent Skills

All Call Centre skills plus written communication skills, social media etiquette

Verbal skills, empathy, patience, quick issue resolving skills

As you can see in the above table, Contact Centres do everything a call centre can, but they also do so much more. With more communication channels coming along daily, it becomes obvious that Contact Centres are a smarter investment for businesses eventually.

Contact Solutions to try

Regardless of your business type, Consnet has all the tools your Contact Centre needs to excel. Additionally, its Contact Centre Solutions offer omnichannel functionality, a live dashboard, and easy integration. Thus, significantly empower your business with one of their Solutions.

For examples of Consnet Contact Centre Solutions, look below:

Sinch contact center

To learn more, click here.