The Real-Time Contact Center

2The Development of the Real-Time Contact Center

According to Gartner Inc., a leading information technology consulting company, a contact center is a multichannel and multipurpose (sales, marketing, and customer service) organization that serves a variety of constituents (customers, prospects, investors, and partners) in a logically consolidated but physically disaggregated setting. What differentiates a contact center from a call center is that the latter handles phone calls (answered by either agents or an interactive voice response [IVR] system) only, while the former involves all types of customer transactions including phone calls, e-mails, chat sessions, and web collaborations. Call centers were sufficient for satisfying customer needs ...