What is a Digital Contact Centre: The Complete Guide

What is a digital contact centre?

Digital contact centre is a cloud-based communication solution that allows businesses to interact with customers from virtually anywhere on several digital platforms, including phone calls, SMS/MMS, live chat, emails, and social media.

Traditional contact centre vs. digital contact centre: what is the difference? 

Unlike traditional contact centre software, digital contact centres are more operationally scalable and flexible.

Traditional contact centres heavily depend on phone conversation features such as call, hold, and wait music.

It often requires setting up bulky hardwares on the job site and regular maintenance from in-house IT departments. This causes the solution to only be accessible on office premises and requires expensive investments.

A digital contact centre, on the other hand, provides modern engagement channels such as email and social media along with traditional features like phone calls and SMS.

Data in this type of solutions are stored in remote servers over the Internet, i.e., in the cloud. This makes the solution accessible from any device with an internet connection, meaning a person can instantly set up and work on the platform from anywhere and without any technical support.

Plus, digital contact centres offer advanced features like call routing, call recording, integrations with CRM, and knowledge base softwares, to help you better serve your customers and improve satisfaction rates.

Key features involved in a digital contact centre 

1. Cloud Infrastructure 

A digital contact centre uses a cloud-based infrastructure that allows your agents to handle all types of communication from anywhere with an internet connection. 

Businesses simply need to subscribe to a cloud-based service such as Mevrik that hosts all the necessary contact centre functionalities.

And the best part is that you don't need to worry about storage, security, or updates of the platform. The service provider automatically updates and maintains the efficiency and effectiveness of the solution over time, thus making it easier for your business to serve customers without any interruption.

2. Omnichannel support

Customers today use multiple channels to obtain a product or service.

A digital contact centre enables an omni-channel strategy that allows your business to be in direct communication with your customers' — regardless of which channel they use — as long as they have an Internet connection.

In Mevrik, we use a feature called Unified Inbox, which collects customer messages from all the digital channels and lands them in one interface. 

Since every channel interaction is in one location, it becomes easier for agents to maintain consistency between different marketing channels and reduce the risks of sending conflicting messages that cause confusion and lots of irritation among customers.

3. Analytics and real-time reporting

Although a multitude of systems are integrated into a digital contact centre to make the support process effective and effortless, the key system that strives to provide positive customer experiences is customer relationship management or CRM.

This software is primarily designed for businesses to organise and effortlessly track all their customers' coming and going activities. You can document information like buying behaviours, likes and dislikes, contact details, demographic information, even birthday details, and so forth.

With the information you gathered from CRM, you can deliver one-to-one personalised interactions with hundreds or thousands of customers.

4. Artificial Intelligence 

When ChatGPT came into the market back in 2022, it dramatically changed the customer service industry.Today, almost every digital contact centre is powered by AI to automate and optimise your workflow.

AI on these platforms has many applications—from response generation to sales forecasting to feedback analysis—that simplify your internal workflows and personalise your customer support interactions.

For example, a chatbot is the first place your customer goes to seek support. You can power this solution with AI to generate human-like messages and automate a large portion of your routine queries.

Additionally, grounded with your customer data and knowledge base, the generative AI tools within these platforms can help your agents write contextually relevant and accurate responses during an interaction. This decreases your agent's first response time significantly and helps you build a trustworthy repertoire with customers.

Read more: AI in Customer Service 

5. Advanced routing and IVR 

Many of us might not know this, but IVRs are the first form of AI many of us encountered in customer service.

This is when you call a support line and the system presents you with a self-service menu. As soon as you choose an option from the phone keypad, you are connected with a representative that specialises in your query through skill-based routing.

Skill-based routing directs any type of customer interaction to the most appropriate agent—whether it be because of their language proficiency, technical expertise, or customer history.

For example, the advanced routing system in Mevrik can significantly optimise your support workflow by assigning queries to the most suitable agent instead of simply routing them to the next available agent. 

This boosts your agents' productivity as they can draw from their personal knowledge, which allows for more effective service.

6. Data security

Most digital contact centres comply with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI-DSS to protect customer data.  

7. GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is a security law passed by the European Union back in 2018 for protecting EU citizens data.

It states security requirements such as:

• Provide transparency on how data is collected and where it goes.
• Establish a data protection design with industry best practices such as authentication, encryption, and internal training.
• Gain consent from users before processing their data.
• Ensure customers have the right to access, modify, and erase their data.

8. HIPAA

If you’re in healthcare, make sure your platform has built-in security measures to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

HIPAA protects sensitive health data from being disclosed to third parties without the patient’s consent or knowledge.

It states security requirements such as:

• Configure technical and physical safeguards to protect electronic personal health information (ePHI).

• Establish physical and technical safety infrastructures, such as access controls and encryption, to protect sensitive personal health information.

• Ensure individuals' rights to access and amend their health information.

• Report any breaches of information to both the affected individual and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

9. CCPA

The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) is legislation passed in 2020 to protect California residents personal data.

This legislation essentially establishes:

• Gain consent from the California resident before recording any interaction.

• Disclose data collection and usage practices for transparency.

• Implement industry-standard security systems based on the nature of the personal information your business handles.

• Keep all recordings of interactions readily available for a certain number of years before removal.

• Ensure customers have rights to access, delete, or modify personal data.

10. PCI-DSS

For any business that processes payment data, use a platform that complies with PCI-DSS regulations.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI-DSS, is a security standard designed to handle and protect customers' payment card numbers—such as credit and debit cards—against malicious attacks and theft.

It states the following security requirements:

• Build and maintain a secure network system through strong firewall configurations.

• Ensure the unreadability of payment information during storage through encryption, tokenisation, or one-way hashing.

• Maintain a vulnerability management program, including regular updates and anti-virus software.

11. Robust knowledge base

While many customers want to resolve their issues independently, there are others who still want human intervention to resolve their issues.

In such situations, your business needs to deliver accurate and relevant support information in a timely manner to make the experience positive.

AI-powered knowledge bases in these digital contact centres guarantee this outcome by using machine learning and NLP capabilities to surface relevant articles during an interaction. This way, you’re giving them the correct information right away.

Benefits of a digital contact centre

You can reap several benefits by using a digital contact centre in your business. Here are some of the following: 

1. Better customer experience

To increase your chances of creating a positive experience for customers, you need to make sure they feel important and let them know that you are intent on fixing the problem.

A digital contact centre is especially useful in this aspect, as a CRM system can help you identify customer buying behaviours, patterns, and preferences to create more personalised support.

Another effective tool that improves your customer experience is chatbots in digital contact centres. Customers can quickly fix their problem on-demand through a self-service portal without going through the hassle of connecting with a service representative. 

Learn more about What is Unified Customer Experience

2. Operational flexibility 

Since all digital contact centres are located in a cloud-based system, this allows for remote work flexibility among employees.

All contact centre interactions and tools can be accessed by agents by logging into the website from any location. This reduces the cost of maintaining a physical infrastructure and allows your business to expand talent pools across the globe to deliver more scalable work.

3. Greater Agent Productivity 

With digital contact centres, your team will never have to spend time manually logging into every digital channel—emails, social media, inbuilt messenger—as all of the interactions are automatically collected and landed in one inbox. This also reduces agents' hassle of going back and forth among multiple tabs.

Plus, AI chatbots' conversational abilities can handle multiple routine queries at once and at any time of the day — which many agents find tedious and challenging. Instead, agents spend their valuable time focussing on resolving complex tasks and nurturing leads that can boost business sales.

Rounding Up 

The key to any successful business is to serve your customers personally and attentively.

With a digital contact centre solution, you can gather all the essential tools like omni channel communication, CRM, AI assistant, and knowledgebase under one platform, which makes it easier for support teams to identify trends and develop experiences that positively impact your bottom line.

Begin thinking about using a digital contact centre to improve your brand engagement? Sign up for Mevrik's free trial today!