A call center is a location where employees that are trained to accept or make calls in behalf of the company they are working for housed. It is a communication powerhouse with multiple phones, high speed internet access and a lot of busy people making and receiving calls. They are supervised by a handful of people who knows more than what they do in case they have more complicated issues that they can’t handle. The supervisors are also responsible for keeping the workforce going smoothly and that all calls are promptly answered.

A contact center on the other hand is a much bigger operation compared to a call center. Aside from handling the basic calls that a call center handles, they also receive, process, and send out letters, emails, faxes, and even attend to live chats. The sheer number of communication that a contact center handles means that their people are specialized. Each category should have a group of people who handles the flow of data.

To simply put it, a contact center is essentially a much bigger establishment that is meant to function as a call center and so much more. The requirement of having a contact center fully deployed is also a lot bigger compared to a call center. When you think about the wide variety of equipment that you need in order to operate a contact center, the amount could easily stack up. Where a call center would only need a couple of phones, a lot of computers and an internet connection, a contact center would have all that added to a couple of fax machines, email servers, and snail mail sorting and storage systems.

Setting up a call center is just also a lot easier to do than with a contact center. If you are establishing a center purely for calls, you basically just need the same setup repeated over and over again. But when you are setting up a contact center, the added complexity of multiple systems adds to the general challenge. Booths for call center representatives require a specific setup while a booth for a live chat representative also requires another, and so does the booths for email, fax, and snail mail people. And somehow, you need to have all this interconnected seamlessly into a single network. The sheer number of people could also mean a lot of strain on your internet connection that might lead to congestion and poor service. This can be addressed by upgrading to a much faster speed or by acquiring another line to augment the first.

Training could also be an issue for contact centers as the varied tasks also require varied skills. It is not that easy to build a contact center due to the large traffic that it handles, but if your company has grown too big for manual methods, this would be the only option left. It would be better though if you already have an established call center so that you can augment each additional feature slowly and deal with the problems that arise.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Step To Call Center Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.