If you are new to the services that Contact Centers provide, this brief overview will provide some history to bring you up to speed.
Call Centers
Historically known as Call Centers, the industry was started using a dialer system to make systematic calls to an identified list of phone numbers. As dialers evolved, they soon added features such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD to efficiently route inbound calls to large groups of customer service representatives, predictive dialing that could make outbound calls without operator intervention and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to allow customers to select from a list of options to route their call to the correct department. (At least that was the idea.)
Often the dialing service was combined with a direct mail campaign to encourage customers or prospects to call back to the call center for additional information or to complete a sale.
Contact Centers
Fast forward to the Internet. Businesses and consumers now have multiple methods of communication which ushered in the modern Contact Center. No longer sufficient to just send mail and answer the phone, the Contact Center employs a number of methods to contact clients, prospects and other interested parties. They have added web sites, email, online chat, click to call. And the list continues to grow to include items like texting and social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.
The sophistication of these systems has also grown to handle the increasing volume and need for reporting. Inbound email systems for a large contact center need the same distribution and monitoring tools as dialers in order to route emails and report on items like time to respond and properly track the communication flow.
Increasing sophisticated customer service issues introduced the need for knowledge base systems to standardize problem resolution and reduce training requirements for multiple CSRs.
The basic concept is that in order to effectively communicate with your clients and prospects you need to have the contact tools in place that they are most comfortable with.