Contact center

A contact center is the combination of people, software and phone numbers a business uses to handle customer contacts across channels such as voice, chat, email and messaging, both inbound and outbound.

From call center to contact center. The older term, call center, describes a phone-only operation. The international standard ISO 18295-1:2017 sets service requirements for customer contact centres of any size and sector, run in-house or outsourced, across all interaction channels inbound and outbound. ISO lists it as due for revision.

The usual parts.

• Telephony and routing. Calls arrive over the phone network or SIP, and routing rules place each contact in a queue for a skill or team.
• Self-service. An IVR menu, a chatbot or, increasingly, an AI voice agent answers first and handles what it can.
• People. Service representatives take the contacts that automation hands on.
• Records. A case or ticket system and the CRM keep the history of each issue.
• Measurement. Metrics such as average handle time, first contact resolution, containment rate and average speed of answer track cost and service.

Many businesses now run this as a cloud service. AWS, for example, describes Amazon Connect Customer as a contact center as a service solution. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service documentation counts conversations that AI agents handle alongside those that reach a representative.

Agents on both ends. Contacts can now come from software as well as from people: AI agents that call or chat on a customer’s behalf. When the business also answers with an AI agent, two programs end up talking through a channel built for people. The alternative is a structured endpoint that the customer’s agent can call directly; see When two voice agents meet on a phone call and the agent-readiness checklist.

Emissar. Emissar’s Front Door is a verified entrance where other companies’ agents reach a business’s service agent directly, in front of the systems the contact center already runs. Status: Open to design partners.

Neighbouring terms. Contact center as a service (CCaaS) is the cloud delivery model. Escalation is how automation hands contacts to people.