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.
Customers expect a quick and efficient response when they contact your customer service by phone. According to the BVA report, they expect a waiting time of less than 2 minutes on the voice channel. This speed is also crucial for the success of outbound campaigns: outbound calls need to be conducted efficiently to maximize sales and improve the productivity of tele-counselors. By optimizing the management of your inbound and outbound calls with an efficient call center software, you can enhance the productivity of your advisors and conversion rates, while reducing customer waiting time…
The telephone remains the mostly widely used communication channel for contacting customer service, according to Gartner. 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. You can also route your phone calls to your digital channels. Equipping yourself with an omnichannel customer engagement solution allows you to offer your customers the option to divert from voice to a written digital channel to minimize their waiting time. They can then choose their preferred channel, such as WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, and many others…
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. Vocalcom’s Call Center software complies with all current regulations in the market. Additionally, for our clients working on international and national campaigns, we have created a flexible and easily configurable product. You can activate campaign settings based on the targeted countries.
Vocalcom’s phoning software offers three automated dialing strategies that adapt to your objectives and team organization: preview, progressive, or predictive. Vocalcom’s predictive dialer is the most efficient call automation system in the market. Coupled with the new Hermes 360 module, Hermes Digital Journey, you can create targeted customer journeys and engage them at the most suitable moments.
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. Vocalcom’s advanced contact center solution, combined with a wide range of social messaging platforms and AI-powered chatbot solutions from Infobip, allows you to adapt to your customers by offering them the channel that best suits their needs: email, phone call, callback, live chat, Twitter, Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Messenger, and more.
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. Opt for a contact center solution that easily integrates with your CRM tools, offering a personalized omnichannel customer experience and improved agent productivity. By easily equipping your CRM(s) with the advanced features of a Call Center software, you put customer data back at the heart of your engagement strategy. Your advisors increase productivity by managing customer contacts through CRM data and real-time tracking of customer history and context.
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.
