What is a call center? Why might you need one, and which contact or call center solution can help?
Whether you’re fielding queries from people seeking support or proactively reaching out to fuel customer engagement, it’s crucial to handle phone calls well, and the call center industry has that down to a science.
Read on for a clear call center definition, a deep dive into the work and types of call centers, their benefits, and how you can take advantage of the best call center solutions.
A call center is a dedicated office or office department whose primary job is to receive calls from customers and resolve the issues reported through them. It can also operate as an outbound contact center, focusing on proactive outreach activities such as lead generation, debt collection, sales calls, and survey taking to help businesses expand customer relationships and achieve their goals.
Having a dedicated customer support hub can seriously boost a company’s efficiency by removing the burden of handling phone calls from the core workers, allowing them to focus solely on tasks demanding their expertise.
Customers calling centers for support can also see benefits. The average center call will be answered faster and addressed more professionally than a typical support call that might be answered by someone with no support skills or experience.
Call centers that provide phone-based customer service take full responsibility for addressing inbound support calls for the companies they represent.
When calls come in, they sort and route them using specialized call center software to ensure even resource distribution and minimize hold times. They then handle the calls as best they can, often by troubleshooting problems, resolving billing issues, investigating complaints, or offering advice.
Call centers that also or exclusively provide outbound calling, however, take different actions. They work on contact lists and scripts, then call relevant people (most commonly sales prospects, but also existing customers). Such centers are frequently associated with cold calling, but they don’t all work that way.
Whatever their services, call centers must also work closely with the companies they serve to ensure they adhere to brand guidelines and focus on the right targets.
There are two core types of call centers: Inbound call centers (AKA incoming call centers) and outbound call centers (AKA outgoing call centers).
The former receive calls, and the latter place them. The two distinct purposes offer different benefits. Let’s go into more detail about their utility:
An inbound call center typically provides assistance to people who’ve paid for a company’s products and/or services.
It may also (or instead) aid people who’ve paid separately for support, whether for a specific company or in general.
Here are some of the things inbound call center solutions must achieve on a daily basis:
The main purpose of an outbound call center is to generate leads and gather data, but it can also be used to reach out to clients regarding their financial obligations such as debts, loans, and mortgages.
Let’s dig into the individual actions:
A robust call center can actually provide both inbound and outbound services, making it what’s known as a blended call center (or, sometimes, a hybrid call center.
This approach works to maximize agent productivity because some agents can do outbound calling during lulls in inbound calling. Other agents, mainly those with specific expertise, can keep their focus on inbound or outbound calls.
Using a call center might not seem like a big deal if you’re just starting your business, but the benefits will get much more significant as your company grows. And if you already have a mature business but handle support calls in another way (or don’t take them at all), you have much to gain from switching things up.
Here are just some of the key benefits you can gain by setting up a call center or outsourcing your phone support to an existing call center:
Any business that wants to use a call center must decide whether to handle phone support in-house or outsource it. An in-house call center is owned and run by one business, while a third-party call center is independently owned and can usually support numerous businesses simultaneously.
Here’s a comparison:
The appeal of running an in-house call center lies in being able to exert complete control over how things are run. Standards, processes, brand representation; you can get the center operating exactly as you want it to.
And being meticulous in that way can really pay off. Agents that know the products and/or services they’re supporting inside-out can deliver superb results.
The downside of this is that it’s often expensive. Quality comes at a price, and traditional call centers operate in large facilities that cost enough to make them difficult for smaller businesses to justify. And when call volume drops but expenses don’t, financial management can become a major problem.
A third-party call center is classically economical. By outsourcing phone support, you can take advantage of existing enterprise-level infrastructure and let experienced support specialists figure out the details.
Dips or spikes in demand aren’t troublesome. You need only cover the recurring costs and deliver enough documentation and insight to ensure that agents are properly trained.
When you outsource phone support, though, your brand reputation can easily suffer. Even if you trust the service you choose, you can never truly know that agents are properly prepared, and keeping them apprised of everything new with your business can present an ongoing challenge.
Ever since the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry grew big, there’s been another way of doing things. An omnichannel contact center solution like RingCentral’s RingCX can provide a superb middle-ground route—allowing you to hire your own agents and handle things in-house without needing expensive office space or specialized hardware.
And if you still prefer to have a third-party operation take charge of hiring, training and deploying support agents for you, you can look for one willing to use your chosen customer support hub. Having a familiar system in place can help you oversee quality and push efficiency improvements.
So far, we’ve discussed the ins and outs of call centers, but phone support is only one part of a strong support system.
Customers often want to reach out (or be reached) in other ways, such as via emails, social media platforms, text messages, or messaging apps (Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.). If you limit your contact options to just phone lines, you might shut out portions of your client base with preferences for other means of communication.
To take advantage of all communication options to connect with your customers, then, you might want to consider a contact center instead. But what is a contact center? Let’s go through it.
A contact center is a customer service hub that uses multiple channels of communication to engage with clients.
Unlike call centers that only handle phone calls, contact centers can also handle emails, live chat, SMS messages, and social media messages. Some providers even offer support for fax.
Here are some of the key differences between call centers and contact centers:
| Call Center | Contact Center | |
|---|---|---|
| Communication channel(s) | Only supports calls | Supports calls, live chat, social media posts, emails, and SMS messages |
| Inbound or outbound | Can support inbound or outbound calls | Supports inbound or outbound tasks via multiple channels |
| Self-service | Is limited to phone-based features such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | Supports self-service via IVR, chatbots, SMS messages, and more |
Despite these differences, of course, call centers aren’t exactly in competition with contact centers. They both provide customer support or sales functions, but a contact center is effectively an upgraded call center.
Whichever type of customer engagement platform you choose to go with, your system has to be equipped with a strong array of features if it’s going to provide exceptional customer support.
Let’s look at the essential features that any traditional call center must have, as well as the kind of technology that contact center software adds on top.
ACD automatically queues and distributes inbound calls to agents. This serves several purposes; it organizes call flow to optimize agent productivity, routes calls to the agents best equipped to handle them, and limits how long customers need to wait.
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Contact center solutions allow agents to access multiple channels from one platform. This lets you contact your customers through a wide range of channels, meeting their unique needs.
Customer relationship management software (CRM software) can be integrated into your contact center to help organize customer profiles. This can lead to unified customer information across your full platform.
Great contact center software is open to rich integrations, making it possible to achieve incredible customization. You can shape your systems to better suit your customers and your support agents.
If you’re seeing substantial demand for phone support, you might be wondering how to start a call center for your business. Before you commit to anything, consider what type of arrangement makes the most sense for your company and your requirements.
If you’re steering a huge business with massive support demand, it’s possible that a traditional call center arrangement (complete with expansive office space) can work for you.
Even in that situation, though, there isn’t much to recommend that way of doing things. Remote workers(whether in-house or outsourced) are so much more economical, and you can keep the quality high if you manage things effectively.
Think carefully about whether a call center or a contact center is best for you. A call center will work well if you and your customers strongly prefer phone support, but a contact center gives you so many more options for getting hold of people.
Whatever approach you want to take, the best first step you can take is choosing the right customer support hub to handle your services. Whether you have a third-party support provider use it for you or hire your own team, having a powerful, reliable and well-rounded software package in place will make things so much easier.