The 5 Features You Absolutely Need for Your Call Center ...

What&#;s the most valuable part of your business? Wouldn&#;t you say that it&#;s your customers? Without them, you have no buyers, no sales, no business at all! So, your ability to deliver outstanding customer service is one of the most important functions of your sales process. Your call center software plays a key role in that process&#; is it living up to your expectations?

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Choosing the Right Call Center Software

When you can offer exceptional customer service, you make yourself a force to be reckoned with in today&#;s ultra-competitive business environment. In fact, the Temkin Group reports that &#;73% of companies with &#;above average&#; Customer Experience maturity perform better financially than their competitors (compared to 44% of less mature companies).&#;

Your call center is the main intersection between your team and your customers. Often, your first impression occurs here. This means that your call center software needs to be a game changer!

As you seek out the right call center software for your business, here are some of the most important factors to watch for:

Communication channels, such as and digital, have become increasingly important in managing customer interactions since:

• 40% of surveyed U.S. customers state that &#;multiple options for communication&#; is the most significant aspect of customer service.
• ~70% of surveyed leaders believe effective customer communication increases productivity

Discover the key contact center software features & examples that will help you to offer an end-to-end customer experience.

Core features

1- Computer telephony integration (CTI)

Computer telephony integration (CTI) connects a call center&#;s systems to its company programs using voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) technology.

With CTI, contact center operators may execute all tasks on their computer utilizing one-screen commands such as accepting and terminating customer calls, placing callers on hold, or forwarding calls.

Some common CTI methods include:

• Click-to-call: Service center agents can initiate calls from their computers by selecting a number.
• Voice to text: Voice communications are converted to text and delivered to an agent&#;s mailbox for review.

2- Interactive voice response (IVR)

~50% of customers hang up on customer support before their problem is handled. Customer patience is at an all-time low, and robust self-service options are critical for fast issue resolutions.

Interactive voice response (IVR) is a system that distributes incoming calls to the most suitable representative or department by leveraging automatic call distribution (ACD) or call routing technology.

There are three fundamental call-routing methods in contact centers:

• Agent-based routing: Operates by directing inbound calls to the service personnel who have been on the line the longest. Calls are queued until an agent becomes available if all agents are busy with active customer discussions.

• Skill-based routing: Directs customers to agents who have the best ability to address their issues based on agent skill, agent performance, the caller&#;s native language, or the subject of the call.

• Predictive routing: Analyzes each discussion based on distinctive parameters such as the customer&#;s previous actions, purchasing habits, or demographics and employs automatic call routing to distribute calls.

Here are a few IVR script examples:

&#;Welcome. Thank you for reaching out to [Company]. Please select one of the following menu items:

• Press 0 for customer service.
• Press 1 for invoicing details.
• Press 2 for technical assistance.

IVRs can also be enhanced to &#;conversational IVRs&#; to foster a more tailored service based on customer intent by combining natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU), allowing users to engage with self-service options.

3- Predictive dialer

A predictive dialer is an instrument that streamlines outbound calls from customers by dialing. The technology helps to forecast outgoing agent availability. If several agents are not free, the predictive dialer will slow down or stop its call distribution until contact center operators become available again.

For example, consider the dialer call data:

• Only one out of every two calls is answered.
• The typical call lasts 90 seconds.
• The average time spent waiting for a call to be responded to is 15 seconds.

In this case, the dialer places two calls whenever an agent is 75 seconds into their current session.

Management features

4- Low-code / no-code development

Low-code and no-code platforms are designed to speed process automation. Our research shows that &#;ease of use&#; is the most often searched (11%) favorable phrase for low code &#; no code development platforms.

• Low-code: Low-code allows for more rapid delivery of apps with minimum manual coding. A low-code platform&#;s visual user interface and drag-and-drop capabilities automate elements of the development procedure.
  Low-code platforms are commonly used by &#;citizen developers&#;&#;enterprise users with no professional coding knowledge, such as business analysts.
• No-code: A no-code development platform (NCDP), like low-code, enables users to develop business apps using drag-and-drop controls rather than traditional manual coding. 

5- Chatbots

Chatbots are software applications designed to simulate human conversation and interact with users via text or voice.

Chatbots help companies to:

• Decrease wait times: ~50% of customers think that waiting too long for responses is the most unpleasant aspect of communicating with businesses.
  Chatbots can help customers spend less time waiting in line, handling messages, calls, or other replies and common inquiries promptly in a conversation screen.

• Handle service cases: ~70% of customers appreciate the simplicity of implementing chatbots on service cases.
  Chatbots can help businesses resolve support situations more rapidly, answering simple inquiries for clients to make them pleased. 

• Provide self-service automation: ~60% of customers prefer to use a self-service chatbot rather than interacting with a human agent.
  Chatbots can rapidly greet customers with a personalized tone and connect them to existing resources such as FAQs, conversations, databases, or knowledge base articles.

Source: Userlike

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Cloud Call Center.

6- Advanced interaction analytics

Advanced interaction analytics may help organizations proactively enhance contact-center performance across four primary use cases:

6.1 Decrease average handle time (AHT) with text and voice analytics

Text and speech data is constantly created via social media channels, interactions with support agents, surveys, feedback forms, and other sources. To make sense of this data, it must be scraped from all accessible channels (including contact-center records).

After scraping the data, businesses can use advanced voice and text analytics to lower average handle time (AHT) by searching and mapping through voice and text data in call records.

Figure 3: Random sampling approach to train, test, and validate data to create intent-based insights

6.2 Reduce call volume

Companies may use advanced interaction analytics to analyze text and traffic volumes. 

Organizations can examine three key elements using analytics: customers, agents, and procedures. 

• Customers: Detect customers who call frequently for little issues.
• Agents: Identify individual performance and detect the agents who has poor resolution rate.
• Procedure: Analyze procedures to detect gaps or systemic weaknesses (such as an ID that is not assigned to the customer on time). 

6.3 Enhance sales conversion rate

Advanced interaction analytics can analyze the characteristics of a client, including real-time data from the present service call, to anticipate the next product or service the customer is most likely to purchase. The analytics can then provide recommendations to increase sales.

7- Call monitoring

With ~60% of respondents stating that businesses need to care about their customers more,  tracking call quality through contact center monitoring technologies is critical for increasing customer satisfaction.

Call monitoring listens to customer service agents&#; conversations to analyze and improve their efficiency.

There are a few different forms of call monitoring:

• Call listening: When a manager listens in on an ongoing call to take observations and offer criticism later.
• Call barging: When a supervisor immediately intervenes by taking over a live call to assist a distressed agent.
• Call recording: When the call between an agent and customer is recorded for future reviews.
• Call whispering: During a call, a manager speaks privately to an agent without the client on the other end hearing anything.

8- Feedback management

Feedback management transforms raw customer feedback into meaningful customer insights.

Some of the benefits of feedback management are:

• Using analytics to analyze consumer comments to acquire customer intelligence.
• Applying speech-to-text conversion to evaluate feedback in both audio and written formats.
• Comparing data-driven agent performance to improve customer retention.

For more on feedback management on social media, read our data-driven and transparent article on social media customer service software.

9- Workforce engagement management (WEM)

Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) is a comprehensive approach to managing and optimizing employee engagement, productivity, and satisfaction within an organization.

WEM is crucial in contact centers because agents are the first point of contact for customers, as 80% of contact center executives say that improving employee well-being is critical to their organization&#;s success.

The activities associated with WEM include:

• Recruitment and onboarding
• Evaluation and improvement
• Data quality management
• Performance management
• Voice of the Employee (VoE) feedback

10- Next best action recommendations

Next best action (NBA) delivers hyper-relevant customer experiences in real-time by recommending the most optimal and valuable actions based on customer profiles. 

Companies can use the next best action recommendations to: 

• Offer customer-specific recommendations.
• Improve sales by employing cross-sell and up-sell.

11- Integrations

Integrations are the processes and technologies that allow different systems, applications, and services to communicate and work together seamlessly.

The distinction between a call center solution and a contact center is based on the methods of communication. While core contact center and call center software features may be used interchangeably there is a systematic difference; call centers mostly rely on traditional  lines, and contact centers use numerous (frequently digital) omnichannel methods.

Read more: Call center stats.

Further reading

Please read our transparent, up-to-date articles to learn more about customer service software and tools.

Please check our transparent and data-driven software list of our contact center vendors.

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