Call Center vs. Engagement Center – What’s the Difference?
By Tim Searcy
CEO, ACCENT Marketing Services
For years, I have heard about a portion of the work that ACCENT does on behalf of our clients referred to as “the call center industry.” Ironically, everything we did was lumped into this one rather narrow definition. At one point, that was probably an appropriate shorthand for what was accomplished in an outsourced customer engagement company like ours. However, that name does not really fit ACCENT. We are not a call center, but rather we are an Engagement Center. Is this just a little marketing jargon to make what we do sound cool? I think not!
I have been a proud member of the teleservices or call center industry for over 30 years, and I am aware that we make and take phone calls on behalf of our clients. Many companies do these kinds of transactions all over the world, and we are part of a huge family focused on directly servicing customers by phone. However, the key components in defining call centers are “transactions” and “phone.” The focus of a call center is about getting the most commerce out of a call in the shortest period of time. Whether selling or servicing, the interaction with the customer is short, sweet, and to the point with little or no relationship involved. Simply put, we are transacting business by phone, and it is as impersonal as ordering drive-thru at your local fast food restaurant. The metrics for this kind of work include call length, first call resolution, and how many minutes out of every hour a representative spent on the phone. This is part of what we do, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
ACCENT is in the engagement business. This extremely small portion of the call center industry is the fastest growing portion of the customer relationship delivery community. ACCENT is on the leading edge of this approach. For you to be able to describe what we do as engagement, or our locations as Engagement Centers, or our customer service representatives as Engagement Specialists, we need to do a little more definition work. The difference between contact and engagement involves understanding the two components that drive contact – transaction and phone. Unlike contact centers, engagement means that we get involved in multiple need interactions and relationships and that involvement occurs over many more channels than just the telephone.
Sometimes it is difficult to explain the complexity of what we do because it continues to evolve as our clients’ needs change. However, we are more like the highly personal retail store than the drive-thru. When customers interact with our engagement specialists, they may have contacted us to buy something, but we can also help them with returns, service on an existing order, or answer questions about their bills. We may be in a position to guide them to a different purchase or resolve a long outstanding issue that they could not solve themselves. The focus of the interaction moves beyond call center metrics and into things like lifetime value, customer satisfaction, likelihood to recommend our client to their friends and other soft metrics.
The second difference between call center and engagement center is the focus on the telephone. In ACCENT’s world, we provide self-service, guided assistance and peer-to-peer support across voice, online and social media channels – adding new communication tools as our clients, customers and markets demand. Our business is about making it more convenient for customers to get more done in every interaction with their product/service provider and to be able to choose from as many different communication channels as they would like.
We are an engagement company with engagement centers that employ engagement specialists to engage with customers on behalf of our clients! That is what we do. That’s what makes us different.
Tim Searcy is the CEO of ACCENT Marketing Services, a member of the MDC Partners Network and a leading provider of customer engagement solutions across phone, online and social media channels. Searcy has more than 25 years of direct marketing and teleservices experience, most recently serving as CEO of the American Teleservices Association prior to joining ACCENT. Tim can be reached by phone at 812.206.6265, or via email at tsearcy@accentonline.com
