Contact center
What is a contact center (and what’s the best software solution)?
At the heart of every successful customer-facing business is contact center software that makes delivering exceptional customer service look effortless.
What is a contact center (and what’s the best software solution)?
Embrace technology, enable remote working, cut down costs, and exceed soaring customer expectations with RingCentral RingCX or Contact Center. We have unified the best UCaaS and CCaaS telecommunications have to offer to provide you with cutting-edge, scalable cloud-based contact center solutions that grow with your business.
With functionalities like real-time reporting, AI-based sentiment analysis, power dialing, and skills-based routing—together with an extensive suite of app integrations—our contact center software is precisely what you need to keep agents happy and deliver first-rate customer support.
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Protect customer information and mitigate business risks by complying with TCPA, DNC, STIR/SHAKEN, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and more certifications.
Advanced features
RingCentral’s contact center solutions include a host of features to help your workforce improve productivity and efficiency—all on one platform.
Seamless and flexible
Connect across communication channels, and interact with customers where they are—by voice, chat, email, and more.
Unmatched reliability
With infrastructure in geographically redundant data centers maintained 24/7, RingCentral provides the highest level of reliability: a guaranteed uptime of as high as 99.99%.
What is a contact center?
A contact center is a hub or department for managing customer interactions across various channels, on behalf of an organization.
It employs a team of agents who are trained to provide reactive and proactive customer support via phone calls, live chat, instant messaging, email, social media, and even video.
What is a contact center?
These terms are often used interchangeably, and they share a common aim—to help customers. However, contact centers and call centers are different things.
Call centers were the original customer support hubs, handling incoming and outgoing phone calls. Although most of them have swapped landlines for internet telephony and added more advanced call management tech, one thing hasn’t changed: the interactions take place via telephone.
Contact centers do handle phone calls. But they also encompass a whole range of further communication channels for maximum convenience. In the best cases, these channels work seamlessly together to deliver a consistent customer experience.
What if a call center expands to include some extra communication channels? Does that make it a contact center? Well, technically you could describe it as such—but the other channels are probably siloed, whereas contact centers tend to take an omnichannel approach.
Types of contact centers
There are a number of different types of contact centers, and the one you choose will depend on the service your business wants to provide to customers.
Inbound vs. outbound
Inbound contact centers are set up to handle incoming calls and messages. Existing customers can get in touch to ask questions, complete specific actions, request technical help, or make a complaint. Prospects may also reach out in response to a promotion or to set up a sales call.
In an outbound contact center, the agents reach out to current or potential customers instead of receiving calls and messages. For example, they might carry out market research, ask for product feedback, send appointment reminders, or follow up on sales leads.
Both categories typically use smart technology to handle interactions as efficiently as possible. Inbound centers use call routing and self-service options to make sure customers aren’t kept waiting. An outbound contact center team, meanwhile, might use automatic dialers or bulk SMS messaging.
A hybrid contact center is a mixture of both types, where agents are usually trained to handle both incoming and outgoing interactions.
Multichannel vs. omnichannel
A multichannel customer contact center does what the name suggests—it handles inbound and/or outbound interactions via multiple channels of communication. However, there’s no integration between the channels, so the data from each is stored separately, leading to siloed information.
Omnichannel contact centers take this idea and make it more efficient, because all the channels are linked. Agents can access things like customer details and interaction history from any channel, so it’s easy to keep track of—and even switch between channels during interactions.
On-premises vs. cloud-based
On-premises systems operate through in-house servers, software, hardware, and all other associated infrastructure kept on-site. That includes the contact center software to manage both outgoing and incoming calls.
In this setup, you own and manage the infrastructure and have full control. But you need an IT team to handle implementation as well as repairs, maintenance work, and upgrades. The tech tends to be outdated, making it harder to add more channels or integrate other systems.
Whether you’re running a call center or a contact center, the more efficient solution is to move your operations to the cloud. A cloud-based contact center is hosted by a third-party provider (such as RingCentral), who owns and manages all the necessary infrastructure in its own data centers.
You don’t need to install or maintain anything on your own premises—you just lease the software from your vendor via subscription. Agents can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. This also means you could set up an entirely virtual contact center with no premises at all, and all agents working remotely.
Innovative contact center solutions for business
Smart business decisions with consolidated contact center reporting and analytics
- Use pre-built reports to understand your contact center performance based on metrics.
- Track and create strategic goals to improve core workflows.
- Gather hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual statistics to perform a more detailed analysis of team productivity.
Positive customer interactions through real-time call monitoring
- Listen in on active customer calls made by support agents in inbound call centers or sales teams in outbound call centers.
- Whisper instructions to your staff, join the conversation, or completely take over the call.
- Utilize automatic call recording and revisit past calls when necessary.
Boost ROI, productivity, and employee satisfaction with workforce management
- Allow teams to view schedules, request changes, manage absences, run training, and control other crucial HR-related tasks.
- Optimize schedules and avoid coverage gaps with automatic scheduling and historical forecasting.
- Set agents up for success by establishing a concrete quality assurance step that can find areas of improvement and offer strategies to address concerns.
Shorten wait times and boost FCR rates with intelligent call routing
- Use IVR systems to determine the caller’s purpose through a series of automated questions and answers.
- Forward responses via automatic call distribution (ACD) for proper queuing and assignment to agents.
- Determine the type of call routing method that best fits your business (skills-based, fixed order, percentage, etc.).
Establishing a true omnichannel presence
- Choose from 30+ digital channels, including all major mobile and social media messaging apps, to connect with your customers.
- Provide your contact center support team with a single, integrated platform for all channels, making customer engagement simpler.
- Give customers the option to resolve issues through phone calls with live agents and through self-service and AI chatbots.
Integrations that make work easier
Make the most of your contact center solution by connecting it seamlessly to your customer relationship management (CRM) software or back-end systems with native integrations or our open application programming interfaces (APIs).
RingCentral RingCX contact center features
Maximize agent performance and create a positive environment that encourages complete customer satisfaction.
Confidently make critical business decisions guided by in-depth information, reports, and insights.
Tailor your contact center according to your business needs by leveraging pre-built integrations and open APIs.
Build stronger relationships by connecting with customers through various digital channels.
Accomplish more with less effort through virtual agents, automated conversations, and customer-performed operations.
Solutions that drive better customer experiences
48%
Increase in customer satisfaction
53%
Increase in employee satisfaction
25%
Increase in average revenue per agent
30%
Decrease in cost to serve
46%
Increase in revenue growth rate
43%
Increase in first contact resolution
Source: 2022 RingCentral Customer Success Metrics Survey.
Contact center FAQs
Contact centers enable agents to interact with customers on all channels, not just over the phone. This means customers can choose their preferred communication method, and they don’t have to wait in a lengthy call queue.
Agents can switch between channels and access relevant customer information to personalize the interaction and deliver a consistent experience.
With the right contact center software, your business can collect and analyze valuable data for a better understanding of customer expectations and preferences—which drives customer loyalty and increases revenue. Smart technology also improves the contact center environment for agents.
What is contact center software?
Contact center software is any computer program that helps an organization to provide effective contact center services. It’s typically available as a cloud-based solution, accessible via the internet.
For omnichannel contact centers, the software ensures that all communication channels are integrated, and also provides integrations with your other business systems such as your CRM. The best software also comes with AI-powered tools.
How do I choose the best contact center software for my business?
There are numerous contact center software solutions available, each with its own list of pros and cons.
Before you make a decision, it’s important to fully grasp the specific needs of your business. For instance, do you mostly handle inbound or outbound interactions? Do you want an on-premises or cloud-based solution? (Hint: go for the cloud.)
Once you’ve made those decisions, do some serious research and take advantage of demos and free trials offered by vendors. Take feedback from your agents before picking the right software for your contact center.
A cloud contact center is an investment. It only makes sense that in your search for one, you should look for advanced features that will benefit your business. Here are some of them:
- Auto dialer - An auto dialer or power dialer is an outbound call center solution that automatically dials customer phone numbers. Once answered, the dialer software plays a recorded message or transfers the call to a live person. There are different kinds of auto dialers, such as preview dialers, progressive dialers, and predictive dialers.
- Caller ID - The caller ID display allows agents to see customer information before getting on the call. This is integral in keeping all calls routed to the appropriate agent—crucial when agents have specific accounts assigned to them. Ultimately, it identifies the caller, retrieves extra information about the call from a CRM or back office system, and routes the call to the appropriate agent.
- Call queuing - When customers reach out to your contact center and all your agents are busy, they are placed in a call queue. In case the wait time is too long, a queue call back (also known as virtual hold) can be offered to the caller. Customers can also stay on the line, listen to the hold music, and wait for the agent.
- Agent scripting - An agent scripting tool provides support teams with prompts to help move interactions along. Armed with a quality script, contact center agents never have to worry about not knowing what to say next—they can shape and guide conversations toward the necessary direction.
The cost of your contact center system will depend on your business size, number of agents and required phone numbers, and set of preferred features. Vendors offer their own plans and pricing, and you should take the time to assess your needs and find a solution that makes the most sense for your business.
Better yet, go for RingCentral RingEX or Contact Center and get complete omnichannel contact center capabilities that empower your customer service operations—and at rates that won’t break the bank, either.
More contact center resources
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