Glossary · Customer service
Contact centre
In one sentence
A contact centre is the team, processes and software that handle customer conversations across several channels, such as phone, email, chat and messaging, using shared queues, agents and reporting.
Also known as : contact centres · contact center · contact centers · call centre · call centres · call center · call centers
What is a contact centre?
The term took over from “call centre” once customers started writing to companies as often as they phoned. A contact centre handles a company’s incoming, and sometimes outgoing, customer conversations on every channel: phone, email, web forms, live chat and messaging apps such as WhatsApp.
It doesn’t have to be a floor of a hundred agents. A small customer service team of four sharing the phones and the inbox works the same way once there are routing rules, a shared customer history and numbers someone actually looks at.
How it works
A contact centre is built from a handful of components, now usually delivered from the cloud as CCaaS:
- Greeting and triage: an IVR sorts calls (“press 1 about an existing order”), and forms or chat menus do the same for written contacts.
- Queues and routing: each contact joins a call queue or its written equivalent, and ACD assigns it to the best available agent according to your rules.
- Customer context: CRM integration shows the customer record the moment a call or message arrives.
- Quality and reporting: call recording, live wallboards and historical reports.
Simple, repetitive requests can be handed to a callbot or chatbot that passes the conversation to a person through a human handoff when needed. Those AI tools are offered by utio.io.
Example
A Cork-based insurance broker with eight customer service staff was handling renewals by phone and claims by email, with no shared view of either. It moved both channels into one platform: calls are routed by reason (renewal, claim, new quote), emails land in matching queues, and every agent sees the customer’s previous calls and messages. Within a couple of months, the team could see that most callbacks were caused by claims emails going unanswered, and fixed the rota accordingly.
Contact centres at Universal Telecom
Our virtual PBX provides the voice building blocks of a contact centre: IVR, call queues, call distribution, recording and statistics. Customer conversations on WhatsApp can be handled by the same team. To connect calls with your CRM or in-house tools, see our developer APIs.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a call centre and a contact centre?
A call centre handles phone calls only. A contact centre brings several channels, such as calls, email, web chat and messaging apps, into the same queues and customer history, so people don't have to repeat themselves when they switch channel.
Do you need a large team to run a contact centre?
No. A small business where three people answer calls and messages under shared rules is already running a small contact centre. What defines it is queuing, routing and measurement, not headcount.
Which contact centre metrics matter most?
Answer rate, average wait time, abandonment rate and first contact resolution. Together they show whether customers can reach you and whether their issue gets fixed.
Related terms
- ACD (automatic call distribution)
ACD (automatic call distribution) is the phone system feature that hands calls waiting in a queue to available agents according to a rule you choose, such as round robin, longest idle or skills-based routing.
- Call queue
A call queue holds incoming callers when every agent is busy and connects them in order of arrival as soon as someone is free, playing music and announcements while they wait.
- IVR (interactive voice response)
IVR (interactive voice response) is the automated phone menu that greets callers and routes them based on the keys they press, such as “press 1 for sales, press 2 for support”.
- CCaaS
CCaaS (contact centre as a service) is cloud-hosted contact centre software. It receives calls, emails and messages, routes them to agents, manages queues and gives supervisors live dashboards and reports, on a per-agent subscription.
- CRM integration
CRM integration connects a business phone system to customer relationship management software, so the caller's record opens when they ring, staff dial with one click and every call is logged automatically.
- Call recording
Call recording saves business phone conversations as audio files for training, evidence, compliance or quality checks. Callers must be told, and the recordings are personal data under GDPR.
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