At the heart of business operations, call centers play an essential role in customer service. Agents take action at every step of the customer journey: prospecting, telesales, customer service, and debt collection. And what challenge do call center managers face? Managing activity volume while offering a personalized customer experience, no matter the communication channel. Since flexibility and agility are vital in a call center environment, here are a few key features for choosing the right call center software.
The telephone remains the mostly widely used communication channel for contacting customer service, according to Gartner in its Customer Channel Preference Research 2020 report. Your call center software must integrate an intuitive interactive voice response (IVR) that is modifiable in real-time with no need for IT support. In this manner, you can adjust your welcome messages, manage your wait queues, and integrate 24/7 self-service options – for example, allowing a customer to check an account, pay a bill, or track a delivery –depending on your current events or call peaks. The call distribution system (or ACD, Automatic Call Distribution) must guarantee intelligent routing of inbound calls toward the most qualified agent available for each type of request.
To gain efficiency in your appointment scheduling campaigns, web lead callbacks, or telesales operations, your call center agents must be able to rely on an automated dialer, offering the choice of preview, progressive or predictive dialing modes to adapt to your campaign needs. In addition, the web callback feature will allow visitors on your website to receive prompt callbacks from agents to respond to their questions and accelerate conversion rates.
With the digitalization of customer journeys, and the rise in online instant messaging, chat, and social media use, customer service takes place on other communication channels as well. To engage in these new practices, contact centers must have an omnichannel contact center software solution, in order to improve the management of customer interactions on all channels within a unified platform. Thanks to a 360° view of all customer interactions, agents can offer personalized answers and deliver a seamless customer experience across different communication channels.
The use of technological solutions that are both powerful and user-friendly for your team is essential to your customers’ satisfaction. An intuitive interface, quick access to customer information, script assistance, real-time tracking of their performance indicators: the usability of your call center software is essential as it helps your agents become the best ambassadors for your brand.
To oversee agent performance and customer satisfaction, your call center software must offer real-time supervision of key performance indicators –call pickup rates, abandon rates, wait times, etc.—in order to react quickly. In addition, an integrated reporting tool will supply detailed statistics regarding your customer service center operations to identify focal points for improvement.
Your call center software is part of an applicative ecosystem which allows you to manage all aspects of customer service. To identify your customers quickly and offer them personalized answers, your call center software must integrate easily with your CRM and industry tools –ticketing systems, helpdesk, and payment, for example. From customer identification in your IVR to contextual customer card pop-ups and customer data enrichment, customer knowledge is a critical factor for the quality of your customer service.
The deployment of chatbots and voicebots for customer service accelerated due to the health crisis to handle activity peaks and offer 24/7 self-service for simple or recurring questions. It offers them a quick answer, based on previous requests made by other customers. For seamless omnichannel service, your bots must integrate with your contact center platform—according to Forrester, 63% of customers are happy to be served by a chatbot, as long as they can speak with an agent if needed.
With a cloud call center software solution, businesses benefit from a turnkey solution without needing to invest in hardware, which will lower the total investment cost. Flexibility, agility, scalability: the cloud is the preferred solution for a quick deployment, across multiple sites or for remote working, with the possibility to add new agents quickly according to your needs. Nonetheless, an on-premise contact center solution can be more suitable in certain particular cases—to integrate with old information systems, make specific developments, or for businesses which have robust internal technical resources, which would make the cost of an on-premise solution less than that of an SaaS solution in the long run.
