1. What exactly is a contact centre?
A contact centre is a department, or a virtual team, where inbound and outbound customer contact is organised. Its defining feature is not the number of people or the technology, but the fact that contact runs through queues: a customer calls or emails, the contact is distributed among available agents, and what happens is measured. That is what sets a contact centre apart from a secretarial office or a row of direct-dial numbers.
In healthcare it is often called a patient contact centre, customer service or simply “the clinic’s phones”. Municipalities talk about a citizen contact centre, or KCC. At emergency response centres it is a control room. The names differ, the mechanics are the same: people call at a moment you do not choose, and you have to make sure someone answers who can help.
Technology is a means to that end. A contact centre runs on a telephone system or contact centre platform (Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Mitel or Microsoft, to name the best known), but that technology does not determine whether you can be reached. That comes down to your staffing, your routing and whether you see in time that things are going wrong.
2. Call centre, contact centre or KCC: the difference
The terms get used interchangeably, and usually that does not matter. Still, there is a nuance that counts as soon as you start procuring or tendering. A call centre handles telephony only. A contact centre handles multiple channels, such as phone, email, chat and WhatsApp, preferably from one environment, so an agent can see that this morning’s caller also emailed yesterday. Citizen contact centre, or KCC, is the term municipalities use for the same thing: the front office that serves citizens and passes questions on to a range of back offices.
“A contact centre is not a department with headsets. It is the agreement that someone answers, and that you know when that fails.”
The distinction becomes important when suppliers start talking about omnichannel. A call centre that also handles email is not yet an omnichannel contact centre. Omnichannel means channels come together in one queue, one customer view and one set of figures. That calls for a strategy before you add a channel. That is the subject of a separate article.
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3. What do you need as a minimum?
Anyone setting up or renewing a contact centre is soon presented with a long list of features. You do not need the vast majority of them to be reachable. What you do need can be counted on one hand:
- A queue with routing. Callers join a queue and go to the first available agent with the right knowledge. Without a queue you do not have a contact centre, just a bunch of direct-dial numbers.
- Real-time measurability. How many people are waiting right now, for how long, and how many colleagues are available? If you only see that in a report tomorrow, you are managing on yesterday.
- A service standard you can explain. For example: 80 per cent of calls answered within 20 seconds. Without a standard, every figure is an opinion.
- Staffing that follows the call pattern. Monday morning in an outpatient clinic is different from Thursday afternoon. Your rota has to follow that, not the other way round.
- On-call duty that works. Outside opening hours or during an outage, it must be clear who is there and which number goes where.
- Administration that does not depend on one person. If the colleague who knows the telephone system is on holiday, there has to be someone who answers when things go wrong.
4. What you often do not need
Suppliers like to sell features. Some of them are useful, some are an expensive way of working around an organisational problem. A few examples we often come across at hospitals and municipalities:
| Often requested | What is usually behind it | What you really need |
|---|---|---|
| Speech recognition in the IVR menu | Callers end up in the wrong place | An IVR menu with three options and good routing |
| A new platform | Nobody sees in real time what is happening | A dashboard on top of the current system |
| Call-back feature | The queue fills up at peak times | Staffing that follows the call pattern |
| Chatbot | Too many repeat questions on the phone | A knowledge base agents can search quickly |
That does not mean those features are never worthwhile. It means you have to name the organisational problem first. At a mortgage provider with five hundred employees, the onboarding time for new customer contact agents went from two months to two weeks. Not through new telephony, but through a knowledge base with a taxonomy that matched the questions customers actually ask.
5. Examples from healthcare and municipalities
A hospital’s patient contact centre handles appointments, test results and repeat prescriptions for dozens of outpatient clinics. Each clinic has its own opening hours and its own number. The problem is rarely the telephone system. The problem is that nobody sees the whole picture: clinic A has twelve callers waiting, at clinic B two colleagues are sitting waiting for a call, and that only becomes visible in the monthly report. A wallboard with opening hours and queues per clinic solves more than a migration.
At a municipal KCC something else is at play. The front office has to answer on behalf of civil affairs, taxes, social services and public works. Knowledge sits in people’s heads, and every department measures something different. The gains there lie in two things: a knowledge base that makes the front office self-sufficient, and a set of figures per channel that you can explain to the council. More on that in our approach for municipalities.
At an emergency response centre it is sharper still. There the question is not whether the contact centre works well, but what happens when it does not work. Who calls the supplier at three in the morning, and how quickly are they there? A pharmaceutical company with a site in the Netherlands was once completely unreachable by phone because of an outdated system. The organisation was reachable again that same day, but it need not have come to that.
6. How to begin, without a new system
You do not have to start with a new platform. In most cases you start with what you already have. First measure what is happening now: pull real-time data from your telephone system and put it on a screen. Effecta Connect Dashboards does that on top of Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Mitel and other environments, without migration. Then agree a standard everyone understands, and let the team see for themselves how things stand. Arrange on-call duty so that forwarding is no longer manual work; Shifts automatically forwards a service number to whoever is on duty. And make sure administration does not depend on one person, whether in house or through Effecta Nexus.
Want to know where your organisation stands on these points? The Real Contact Scan gives you a score for reachability, insight, on-call duty and continuity in three minutes, set against comparable organisations.