# 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

1. **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.

2. **Process orchestration**  
   A sophisticated infrastructure supports increasingly complex and personalized customer engagements.

3. **Resource management**  
   Staff is engaged and empowered with advanced AI technology that powers a stronger customer experience and helps prevent agent burnout.

4. **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.