Call Center vs Contact Center: Key Highlights & Differences

Gomathi Ramachandran Published On November 7th, 2024 Insights

“Call centers today stand as one of the prime heart-hubs for several businesses looking to boost customer service.”

That being said, many customers call in to resolve their queries and reps call out to market their products. This is what happens in a call center. And lately, the call center has evolved into the contact center.

1. So what does both the term mean, 
2. what are the real differences between call center vs contact center, and 
3. Which approach should businesses choose to improve customer satisfaction?

What is Call Center?

A call center is a space or a department that is built to handle customer queries, service requests, and outbound sales calls over the phone. 

Call Center CRM systems play a crucial role in managing these interactions efficiently by providing tools to track customer history and streamline communication.

Plus, call centers are equipped with CRM tools and advanced telecom technologies to increase customer response time, streamline operations, and boost customer service.

We can see call centers are categorized into two types:

• Inbound call centers: Calls made by the customers regarding billing, tech support, and knowledge-base support.
• Outbound call centers: Here, agents make calls to customers that can either be to promote a market, a sales call, a debt call, or more.

Though call centers offer these, customers still have the bad impression that when they dial in, they are routed through a programmable IVR that might increase their response time. And this led to the growth of a contact center solution. 

Recent Stats On Call Center

Here are some of the important statistical data to consider by businesses who use call centers as a service:

• The satisfaction score is 73%
• 80% of calls are answered in less than 20 seconds
• Agent interactions will increase by 10% in 2026
• 73% of customers value call center BPO setup as a good sign to boost satisfaction

Did you know? Contact centers are now evolving to become cloud-based contact center solutions. All thanks to cloud SDKs that make this tech work.

What is a Contact Center?

Contact center is a centralized department managing customer queries, requests, and interactions through a wide range of communication channels like emails, live chats, social media, VoIP, SMS, in-app chats, video, and phone. 

Plus, businesses usually integrate CRMs to contact center solutions to seamlessly track and manage all interactions happening with the customers and agents.

Recent Stats On Contact Center Usage

Now, here are some of the important statistical data to consider by businesses who use contact centers as a service:

• 79% of customers feel their queries are answered instantly
• 38.08% of contact centers use post-contact survey
• 58% of customers used chatbots for queries 
• Contact centers helped customers not wait for a long time

Now, let’s understand the difference between Call Center Software and Contact Center Solutions

Call Center Software	Contact Center Solutions
Communication is mostly on a telephonic network (only by voice).	The communication is carried on different channels (text, video & voice).
It’s completely predictive based on agent’s ideas, ineffective.	It’s a proactive action, increases customer service efficiency through reaching customers over social
The response time certainly depends on agents and issues.	It empowers self-service with IVR, Call recording and so on.
	Advanced call routing increases consistency and betterment customer experience.

So finally understanding that your businesses can thrive and succeed upon using a contact center solution, what’s going to be your next great step?

Simply integrate an enterprise-based contact center API to your existing application. Now with a lot of options available in the market, it is going to be a tough one to choose the right solution.

And that’s where MirrorFly’s modern contact center support APIs come into play that offers you to add omni-channel services with advanced features thereby boosting agent-customer interactions 3X times. 

What are the benefits of using a contact center solution for your business?

Below are some of the major benefits that businesses find upon embedded this type of support:

Scale Your Customer Service Globally:

With enterprise contact center features, you can scale elastically across different regions, different customers across the countries through functionalities such as:

1) SIP/VoIP To make Carrier Calls:

Get rid of making calls with the actual and limited budget plan to carrier networks. Go unlimited voice calls across any carrier device instantly and make concurrent calls.

2) Add Virtual Phone Numbers:

Access instantly to local, national, international, and mobile phone numbers based on your tailored business needs.

3) Engage Customers Through WebRTC:

Make virtual calls video calls to any device from your web interface and provide a better customer experience to your customers at any time.

Communicate Through Multiple Channels

1) Make Real-time Chat With Customers:

Make instant web and mobile chat with customers to transfer rich information over a secure chat screen.

2) Give them in-person experience with Video Call:

Make face-to-face video interaction with your customers for information sharing, visual solutions right from any device (App or Web).

3) Reach Customers on their device with Voice Calls:

Enable customers to schedule calls over the internet from their phone, website or app to engage and offer instant support to their queries over any device.

4) Interact With Customers On Social Platforms:

Enable customers to schedule calls over the internet from their phone, website or app to engage and offer instant support to their queries over any device

Enhance Customer Experience

1) Multi-level IVR To Direct On-going Calls:

Route your customer calls to the relative support team through a self-service system. Greet customers with an interactive voice response (IVR) system to customize the call flow to the right person or team to solve their needs in a much quicker way.

2) Monitor Every Single Call With Call Recording:

Track the entire calls of your customer’s conversation to analyze your communication effort and take up decisions to improve your customer experience.

3) A Real-time Hub To Monitor On-going Calls:

Manage your entire calls and call center within a real-time dashboard. Analyze the list of live calls, calls queues taking place between your customer and agent to optimize the performance of your call center.

4. Centralized Management Hub To Control Overall Calls:

Optimize your entire contact center with a real-time and virtual contact center management to operate calls and analyze the performance of your team.

Why Should You Go With MirrorFly’s Modern API Based Contact Center Solution?

1. Customization has been the Prime

When you build a modern contact center with all several communication channels and features, you have the opportunity and freedom to customize the contact center solution based on the exact user experience that your customers would love to experience.

Let it be communication channels (voice, video & chat, SIP/VoIP), UI/UX, other functionalities, you can design it according to your desired needs and drive better customer experience.

2. On-Premise/Cloud-Hosted Contact Center Solution

Whatever the hosting possibilities, whether you want your data to be available on cloud or could be managed entirely under your premises with robust security, Modern contact center API is ready with any hosting flexibility.

3. One-time License Cost For Entire Platform

Pay only for the features, communication channels that your business demands. Get rid of the monthly subscription-based options, own the entire contact center platform armed with all communication channels and features.

Just pay once for all the communication channels, features, and functionalities, experience unlimited calls right from your contact center Application to customers’ devices.

4. Enhance Team Productivity

With us, set up your communication features in < 10 minutes and get a chance to scale your app with billions of interactions. Plus, avail benefits of interacting with your customers through chatbots and ChatGPT powered support.

5. Best-in-class Real-time Communication Features

Use our SDKs and connect with supervisors, agents, customers, and managers through 1:1 and group chats, secure video conferencing, video or audio calls, and share documents instantly. 

What are the Industries Our Contact Center API Supports?

Delivering the best customer experience is the key soul of any industry. Upgrading the call center software with a virtual contact center solution would be the best ever decision that an organization can take to offer the utmost customer service and excel in the business. Here are some top industries that have seen sublime growth using the contact center platform.

Wrapping up!

To conclude, a contact center is an ideal revenue-boosting hub for any business and investing in it isn’t a big deal. Because, choosing the right one for your business is what is required. 

So, if you are thinking of adding value to your enterprise, grow your customer service strategy, and meet the user expectations with top-notch services, simply opt our contact center APIs that just elevates the service experiences.

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