Contact Center vs. Call Center: What's the Difference?

What Is a Contact Center?

A cloud contact center enables customers to interact with businesses on their preferred channels. Contact center agents can field inquiries via voice calls, chat, text messaging, or social media and provide consistently high-quality service at every touchpoint for a seamless customer experience.

Modern cloud contact centers give businesses advanced features enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) that allow them to continually enhance customer service capabilities. Skills-based routing ensures that customers are directed to the representatives most qualified to address their issues, and when this is combined with tools like call center workforce management, you can streamline agents scheduling and quality management, maximizing the call center's workflow. Meanwhile, AI-based chatbots and voice assistants can offload inquiries during high-volume times and enable self-service options.

Cloud contact centers can be integrated with a wide variety of business applications, from customer relationship management (CRM) to marketing software to billing solutions.

What Is a Call Center?

A call center is exactly what it sounds like: an operation that takes or makes voice calls. In a traditional call center, agents would sit in cubicles with landline phones and computers to look up information from various siloed databases. Modern organizations often use call center platforms instead. They can handle both customer service representatives who answer incoming calls from customers with tech support issues, billing questions, or other service requests, as well as outbound teams that manage sales, surveys, marketing offers, and fundraising.

Call center solutions often provide standard features, including call routing and queuing, real-time agent performance monitoring, call center recording, and the opportunity for supervisors to intervene on calls. Cloud-based call centers can also integrate with a company's CRM system, boosting productivity by ensuring agents have fast access to relevant customer information.

Key Differences Between Contact Centers and Call Centers

Delivering great customer service is a must — in fact, the Vonage Global Customer Engagement Report 2024 notes that 46% of customers only need one or two bad experiences with a business before they’ll look elsewhere!

Call centers and contact centers can help eliminate that churn. But they both have pros and cons you’ll need to weigh before you decide on a solution. Here’s an outline of the main differences to help you decide which one would work best for you.

Range of Channels

The main difference between contact center and call center technology is the number of channels they use to provide customer service and support.

A call center consists of just one communication channel — phone calls — while a contact center consists of multiple communication channels. This could be phone calls as well as email, social media, SMS, and live chat support.

Having a singular channel for all of your customer communications can be useful for a small team that only requires voice calling. Paying for additional channels is an unnecessary expense if you don’t have the demand for them. Plus, agents can hone their skills and focus their attention on one channel without needing to worry about implementing new best practices and metrics, streamlining operations.

That said, modern consumers increasingly expect an omnichannel customer experience. They want to be able to connect with customer service teams on their preferred channel (or whichever channel is most convenient at that moment). And they want this communication to be seamless and consistent across channels.

If you use a separate call center service and email service to provide support, for example, you’re going to experience data silos. There’s no link to your call team and vice versa, which makes tracking customer interactions and providing a personalized, consistent experience difficult.

This is where contact centers shine.

Cloud contact centers not only provide a range of channels, but they unify these channels, their data streams, and CRM information. So, regardless of the channel a customer uses — or which channels they bounce between — agents can access their entire customer profile, from their previous interactions and purchase history to their ongoing customer journey.

Customer Self-Service Options

The majority of customers prefer self-service options to resolve simple issues — 61%, in fact, according to the sixth edition of Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer” report.

Call center services typically provide just one self-service option: an interactive voice response (IVR) system. IVR systems are automated systems that use speech recognition, dynamic menu options, and pre-recorded messages to interact with incoming callers. They can route callers to the relevant agent, schedule callbacks, and even resolve customer issues.

IVR systems are useful but limited. Contact centers go beyond IVR to provide a wider range of self-service options that meet customer needs.

AI-powered chatbots, for example, simulate human conversations to answer and resolve customer queries and issues. Not only are they more adept at issue resolution, but they provide this service 24/7 across multiple channels, such as websites, mobile apps, SMS, and instant messaging platforms. Contact centers use them to reduce customer wait times, enhance agent productivity, and lower costs.

Other contact center self-service options, like SMS, AI-powered knowledge bases, mobile apps, and community forums, also allow customers to resolve issues independently.

Customers can, for instance, reschedule or cancel appointments via SMS, find the answer to their questions via smart online knowledge bases, and change their order details via mobile apps. And all of these channels are integrated to provide customers with omnichannel experiences.

Integration Possibilities

When you integrate your call center and contact center platforms with your other business apps, you streamline workflow management, create seamless dataflows, and empower teams to provide more consistent, unified customer experiences. This is why analog call centers are a no-go for modern business communications as they’re difficult — sometimes even impossible — to integrate with other applications. 

Cloud call centers and contact centers offer powerful CRM integrations that synchronize data flows between the two systems. This means that customer service agents can access rich customer data from a centralized system as soon as they begin a call.

CRM integrations are particularly useful for contact center agents, as they can view comprehensive customer insights across all of their channels.

There are lots of other integration possibilities too — for example, Vonage works with Clio, making it easy for lawyers to track billable hours. Contact center platforms offer a wider range of integrations than call center services, from social media tools to messaging platforms, email management solutions, and more.

Scalability

The infrastructural rigidity of analog call centers makes them notoriously difficult and expensive to scale. You need to buy and install new equipment and reconfigure existing systems, often making risky guesses along the way. If you over or underestimate your needs, you’re at risk of losing serious money.

Both cloud-based call and contact centers are inherently scalable. You can scale up and down in response to demand, optimizing costs and contact center efficiency. In this case, they’re on a pretty even playing field.

Agent Skills Required

Call center and contact center agents all require exceptional customer service telephone skills: empathy, friendliness, problem-solving, product/service knowledge, and patience, among others. However, contact center agents will need to possess extra skills in order to manage communications across multiple channels.

Agents who provide support over email and social media, for example, will need to have excellent written communication skills, including good grammar, punctuation, and clarity. Some channels require certain etiquette, too. SMS communication needs to be simple and concise, for example, while social media responses should prioritize positivity and responsiveness.

Contact center agents must also be able to multitask to manage conversations taking place across different channels, adapting their styles accordingly.

Technology and Features Required

Call centers and contact centers require many of the same technologies to function. This of course includes phones, computers, headsets, and an internet connection. Beyond that, both services benefit from features like IVR, virtual assistants, and call analytics, as well as additional software like a CRM and a workforce management system.

But, because contact centers handle multiple channels, they require more technological support to be leveraged to their full potential. This includes:

• Omnichannel routing: Using AI, omnichannel routing technologies analyze the intent, complexity, and urgency of inquiries coming in across all channels to ensure that conversations are routed to the best agent.

• AI-powered analytics and reporting: AI analytics can analyze data across all channels to uncover behavioral patterns and make predictions that can be used to optimize customer journeys. Reporting features track KPIs and produce visual, in-depth insights that managers can leverage to make improvements.

• Workflow automation: With so many channels in use, workflow automations can be widely implemented to optimize agent workflows and contact center efficiency.

Which Is the Right Choice for Your Business?

As you’ve seen, call centers offer fewer advanced features and more limited analytics than contact centers. If your business is just starting out and not looking to build a full omnichannel customer service organization anytime soon, the call center might be the right choice. However, for businesses looking to increase revenue and differentiate themselves from the competition through peerless service for their customers, a contact center probably makes more sense.

When faced with choosing either a contact center or a call center, it's important to consider reliability, scalability, and cost. Regardless of company size or industry, excellent and dependable support is essential.

Reliability

For customer service operations, downtime is not an option, and businesses can't afford to take their communications offline every time they need to change configurations or update software. Thus, a cloud-based call center or contact center is a valuable investment. When choosing a solution, it's important to find one that offers consistently high uptime and an ironclad service level agreement that guarantees excellent voice service.

Scalability

Cloud-based offerings are also more scalable, allowing room for seamless growth, support for multiple locations, and even customization when needed. Cloud call centers might be scalable, but they still offer only one channel. With cloud contact centers, companies have a future-ready omnichannel infrastructure in place that can handle their emerging needs as they develop. Even if the business only needs voice calling today, it's prepared to launch chat and social later on.

Cost

Cost is always a concern, but both cloud-based call and contact centers provide attractive economic benefits. Rather than requiring considerable hardware, software, and upfront capital expenditures, cloud-based solutions are plug-and-play and pay-as-you-go, so businesses can gradually expand their operations and capabilities in a cost-efficient manner.

Today, customers expect businesses to deliver a high-quality customer experience, and businesses are responding by making strategic investments to fulfill these expectations. When the time comes to select a call or contact center to enable robust customer service, businesses have powerful options available to meet their needs today, tomorrow, and beyond.

Upgrade Your External and Internal Communications

Whether you end up with a call center or a contact center, you need an advanced solution that not only helps you deliver exceptional customer experiences but also enhances internal communications, too. This is where Vonage Business Communications can help.

Vonage Business Communications comes with a range of flexible, easy-to-use features that upgrade your external and internal communications. Powerful call management features like simultaneous ring, find me/follow me, and call forwarding ensure that you never miss a call from a customer or colleague again.

You can also get international company numbers to enable customers to call you from any location — without incurring high international calling charges.

Plus, you can seamlessly integrate your cloud phone system and mobile apps with a wide range of powerful CRMs and business productivity apps to sync data flows, and you can access advanced call handling and management capabilities across applications.

Contact Vonage Business to learn more about how cloud-based communications can improve your customer experience and your bottom line.