Contact Center Solutions, Definition, and Benefits | Microsoft Teams
What is a contact center?
A contact center helps you meet your customers where they are with a seamless and consistent experience across channels.
Optimize your business with a contact center
Contact center solutions allow your business to grow by saving time and resources, while simultaneously building brand loyalty.
In-house contact centers
In-house contact centers are installed and hosted on physical servers on-premises.
Virtual contact centers
Virtual contact centers offer omnichannel capabilities offsite with a remote staff.
Cloud-based contact centers
Cloud-based contact centers are hosted by cloud providers’ internet servers.
Hosted contact centers
With hosted contact centers, the infrastructure is outsourced externally.
Why use a contact center?
The modular infrastructure of a contact center modernizes your business by boosting efficiency, security, and flexibility.
Save time
Adapt and scale your business to your customers’ needs with omnichannel contact centers.
Work smarter
Maintain a database of support history to help agents pursue next steps to resolve issues rather than retreading the same information.
Improve customer experience
Enable digital engagement support via in-app chat, text, social media, and email for a smooth, seamless customer journey.
Strengthen your brand
Build lasting customer relationships by demonstrating your team is reachable, reliable, and committed to personalized problem solving.
Keep a competitive edge
Stay ahead of the competition with superlative service, since customer care is quickly overtaking product and price as the number-one differentiator.
Scale up
Adapt and scale your business to your customers’ needs with omnichannel contact centers.
How contact centers work
Getting connected
Contact centers focus on delivering a channel-agnostic, architected design to create customer service journeys, including enhanced self-service. Services are consumed on a per-seat, per-concurrent-user, or transaction basis.Process orchestration
A sophisticated infrastructure supports increasingly complex and personalized customer engagements.Resource management
Staff is engaged and empowered with advanced AI technology that powers a stronger customer experience and helps prevent agent burnout.Knowledge and insight
Contact center technologies and capabilities deliver customer and operational insights and recommend next-best actions across all functional groups.
Teams Phone advanced capabilities and contact center integrations
Engage your customers with targeted solutions that are tailor-made to fit your organization’s needs.
Teams Phone advanced calling capabilities
Streamline internal and external customer call management experiences with built-in auto attendants, call queues, and voice-enabled channels in Teams.
Teams-certified contact center solutions
Optimize customer engagement with an easy, seamless experience when connecting your existing contact center solution with Teams.
Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform
Deliver a more innovative customer experience across all channels, driven by the Microsoft Cloud, Dynamics 365, Teams, Nuance, and Azure Communication Services.
Frequently asked questions
What are contact centers?
Contact centers help you to meet your customers where they are with omnichannel support all day, every day.
What is the difference between a call center and a contact center?
Contact centers are an enhanced form of call centers, supporting both voice and digital engagement channels to help modernize your service business and prepare you for the future.
Why are contact centers important?
Contact centers offer a much more robust level of support which allows businesses to evolve and strive for customer retention in an ever-competitive market.
What are the different types of contact centers?
Contact centers are in-house, virtual, hosted, and cloud-based.
How do contact centers work?
Contact center technologies and capabilities deliver customer and operational insights and recommend next-best actions across all functional groups. Staff is engaged and empowered with advanced AI technology that provides a stronger customer experience.