The contact center for frictionless engagement

Contact center software is the technology that allows you to manage interactions with customers across channels like email or phone calls. It often has an interactive voice response (IVR) system to route customers to the right resource, agent, or rep. 

A contact center solution may integrate with other systems like customer relationship management (CRM) software so you can collect or process customer data. It can also support call recording and call transcriptions for quality assurance and performance tracking. 

Some contact center software is cloud based. This makes your contact center functionality available over the internet and stores data in distributed data servers instead of hard drives, so you can access it virtually. 

By nature, cloud contact centers avoid the rigidity of traditional solutions like on-premise contact center hardware. And you get much more flexibility to add the features and functionality you need for a custom experience, the ability to scale up or down, and make adjustments as needed.

Read more about cloud contact centers and the advantages.

A call center solution is software that enables you to support customers. While “call center” historically referred to phone-only support, the term is sometimes now used to refer to “contact center solution” broadly. 

Call center solutions specifically let you handle inbound and outbound customer support calls. And they can function within contact center software, where you can handle all of the communication you have with customers across email, SMS, chat, WhatsApp, and other channels.

When choosing a solution, consider the following factors: 

Features

• Can it support the channels you need (SMS, email, call, chat, and other messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger)?

• Does it include call routing functionality?

• Will it integrate with your CRM and other existing systems 

• Does it provide reporting to to track your team’s KPIs and view results through dashboards?

• Does it support cloud-based calling?

Flexibility

• Is it easy to add channels if you need to expand your communications options?

• Is it possible to change functionality to keep up with the way your team works?

Cost

• Does it fit your budget for contact center software? 

• What’s the pricing model (by seat or by hour)?

A call center offers customer support exclusively over the phone. A contact center solution enables you to provide support over multiple channels—phone, email, SMS, chat, and more—for a holistic and modern customer experience that adapts to customer needs. It gives businesses more ways to reach and support customers, ultimately providing a better experience. 

Read more about the distinction between call centers vs. contact centers.

Inbound call center

Inbound call centers receive incoming phone calls from customers. They typically handle customer service requests, purchases or refunds, and product questions. Calls are often routed through an interactive voice response (IVR) system to determine the nature of the request before routing the caller to the an agent. 

Outbound call center

An outbound call center makes calls to customers or sales leads. These types of contact centers typically focus on reaching out to a list of leads to make sales. Integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) software are particularly important so reps know who they’re talking to and can easily update customer data.

Learn more about the difference between inbound and outbound contact centers.

On-premise contact center

An on-premise contact center has software and hardware on-site. It’s the traditional model of contact center software that requires agents to be in an office to access the programs and phone lines. This type of call center is associated with higher security as well as higher costs and less flexibility.

Cloud-based content center

A cloud-based contact center is a virtual version of the on-premise alternative. Cloud contact center software can be accessed through the internet and it stores data in distributed data servers. It allows agents to login and access the software online, so they can work remotely. A cloud contact center can be set up quickly with little upfront investment and adapted easily through application program interfaces (APIs). 

Read more about on-premise vs. cloud-based contact center solutions.

Contact center software lets you: 

• Support phone-based customer service as well as digital channels like WhatsApp or webchat 

• Support outbound sales calls or serve as an internal help desk

• Support virtual agents for a remote contact center if it’s cloud-based

• Connect customers to an agent with an IVR system or route them to a specific agent with intelligent routing based on speech input

• Handle calls with the ability to mute, place holds, and make warm transfers 

• Record calls and make transcriptions for compliance and quality assurance purposes

• Track KPIs for reporting on contact center or agent performance

• Support inbound and outbound traffic

Some of the features you get with Flex are:

• A single user interface for all channels and applications to increase agent productivity

• Channel support for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Business Messages, SMS, chat, phone, and email

• Flexibility to adapt and deploy new channels quickly to keep up with customers’ preferences 

• Customizable reporting and dashboards to track your contact center KPIs through Flex Insights

• Custom IVRs for self service

• Intelligent routing to assign tasks to the right agent automatically, with escalation and fallback rules

• Integrations with any system you use for customer data, ERPs, billing systems, inventory management, and homegrown CRMs

• Click-to-dial and click-to-text for seamless outreach

• Bring Your Own Carrier to keep your current PSTN voice carrier and phone number

• AI integration with  Google Contact Center AI to surface recommended responses to customer questions

• Per-agent-hour pricing so you can scale up or down as needed and improve operational efficiency

There are a few ways you can approach a Flex implementation.

1. Build: Create a custom Twilio Flex contact center with developers on your team.  Companies like Shopify deployed Flex in 4 months with their team. 

2. Work with a Twilio-certified partner: If you don’t want to build yourself or don’t have the developer resources to support a full build, our partners can help you design, build, and maintain Flex. View our list of partners 

3. Work with Twilio Professional Services: Get personalized support for your Flex contact center deployment. We also have a library of plugins you can use to add common Flex use cases. Browse our plugin library

Twilio Flex has flexible pricing options. 

1. Free trial: Start with a free trial that includes 5,000 active user hours to test it out. 

2. Per-hour hour pricing: Per-hour pricing starts at $1 per hour. It allows you to pay for just the hours you use if you need the flexibility to scale up or down.

3. Per-user pricing: Per-user pricing starts at $150 per named user. This includes agents, supervisors, or administrators and gives you predictable spend regardless of user activity hours. 

Review our Twilio Flex pricing page to compare models and start to estimate costs of your contact center.