Choosing the right call center software in 2021

The call center is the core of business operations and plays a vital role in customer service. Agents take action at every step of the customer journey: prospecting, telemarketing, customer service, and debt collection. What challenges do call center managers face? Regardless of the communication channel, provide a personalized customer experience while managing the volume of activities. Since flexibility and agility are essential in a call center environment, here are some key features for choosing the right call center software.

Optimize your inbound and outbound call management

Route your inbound calls intelligently

According to Gartner’s “Customer Channel Preference Research 2020” report, telephone is still the most widely used communication channel for contacting customer service. Your call center software must integrate intuitive interactive voice response (IVR), which can be modified in real time without IT support. In this way, you can adjust the welcome message according to the current situation, manage waiting queues and integrate 24/7 self-service options, for example, allowing customers to check accounts, pay bills or track deliveries. Incidents or call peaks. The call distribution system (or ACD, automatic call distribution) must ensure that inbound calls are intelligently routed to the most qualified agent available for each request type.

Automate your outbound call campaigns

In order to increase efficiency in appointment scheduling campaigns, web lead callbacks or telesales operations, your call center agent must be able to rely on an automatic dialer that provides preview, progressive or predictive dialing modes for you to choose from to suit your campaigns needs. In addition, the web callback feature will enable visitors to your website to receive instant callbacks from the agent to answer their questions and speed up the conversion rate.

Offer a unified customer experience on all channels

With the digitization of customer journeys and the increased use of online instant messaging, chat, and social media, customer service is also carried out through other communication channels. In order to adopt these new practices, the contact center must have an omni-channel contact center software solution, in order to improve the management of customer interactions on all channels within the unified platform. With a 360° view of all customer interactions, agents can provide personalized answers and provide a seamless customer experience across different communication channels.

A software solution that drives efficiency

Improve agent comfort

For your team, the use of powerful and user-friendly technical solutions is essential to meet the needs of customers. Intuitive interface, quick access to customer information, script assistance, real-time tracking of its performance indicators: the usability of call center software is crucial because it can help your agents become the best ambassadors of your brand.

Monitor your operations in real-time

To monitor the performance of business representatives and customer satisfaction, your call center software must provide real-time monitoring of key performance indicators (call pickup rate, abandonment rate, waiting time, etc.) in order to react quickly. In addition, the integrated reporting tool will provide detailed statistical information about your customer service center operations to identify areas for improvement.

Choose an open software solution that integrates with your CRM

Your call center software is part of an application ecosystem that allows you to manage all aspects of customer service. In order to quickly identify your customers and provide them with personalized answers, your call center software must easily integrate with your CRM and industry tools (such as ticketing systems, service desks, and payments). From customer identification in IVR to contextual customer card pop-up windows and rich customer data, customer knowledge is a key factor in customer service quality.

Integrate the latest innovations in automation and AI

Due to the health crisis, the ability to deploy chatbots and voice robots for customer service can be accelerated to cope with peak activity and provide 24/7 self-service for simple or recurring problems. It can provide quick answers to other customers based on their previous requirements. In order to provide a seamless omnichannel service, your bot must be integrated with your contact center platform-according to Forrester, a chatbot can be happy for 63% of customers, as long as they can talk to an agent when needed .

Cloud or on-premise software?

With the help of cloud call center software solutions, enterprises can benefit from turnkey solutions without having to invest in hardware, which will reduce the total investment cost. Flexibility, agility, scalability: Cloud is the preferred solution for rapid deployment across remote work or multiple sites, and new agents can be quickly added according to your needs. However, local contact center solutions may be more suitable in certain specific situations-integration with old information systems, specific development, or for companies with strong internal technical resources, which will increase the cost of local solutions in the long run From a standpoint, it is less than a SaaS solution. 

Source: Vocalcom