Best Tools for Call Centers
Best Tools for Call Centers
Call centers experience a major change nowadays as remote working becomes more common than ever. According to the latest statistics, it is estimated that one-third of companies regularly employ remote workers, and this number is increasing. So how does this change affect call and contact centers? Communication software is now needed to support remote agents. These communication softwares also need to provide the features and flexibility needed by call center agents communicating with customers from anywhere in the world. Best tools for call centers are needed to be successful and provide the best possible service, whether agents are running their business in the office, remotely or hybrid. There are key tools and features to consider when looking for the best tools for call centers.
Help desk software
Help desk software helps call centers provide omnichannel customer support. Customers put less strain on agents by using the communication method they use. You can feel this effect more clearly, especially if you provide support through web chatbots. Help desk software makes it easy to streamline incoming messages by customer support teams. These softwares do not need separate software to handle phone calls, emails and live chat messages as they perform all interactions in a single interface.
CRM software
Integrating your call center software with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform prevents customers from having to contact several different people for adequate support. Contact center software syncs data from each tool, giving you a more holistic view of your customer conversations. Some call center agent features can even check the incoming caller's phone number for a match in your CRM. So you can see the caller's name, company, survey response, account value, customer experience score.
Desktop softphone and mobile app
Having software that offers the features that agents can manage calls from anywhere enables your call center to work from anywhere and under any conditions and speeds up the workflow. Working with a cloud-based solution rather than an on-premises phone gives your team flexibility. It also gives the ability to answer job calls with their own devices without being dependent on office devices. Any internet-connected mobile devices such as smart phones, laptops, tablets are enough to make calls. More importantly, your agents could have virtual business numbers for calls instead of their own personal lines, and they always have the corporate look of your call center no matter where they work.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is one of the best tools for call center operation as it can help you handle increased call volumes without putting too much workload on your call center agents, especially for businesses with limited staff. Forwarding calls through an IVR system improves the overall customer experience and prevents your incoming callers from waiting in long queues for simple support. Incoming calls are quickly and efficiently routed to the agent best equipped to resolve the issue.
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is a feature that identifies callers, queues them up, and automatically forwards them to the appropriate team. Instead of asking incoming callers to click the number that best fits their query, call center software uses the information they already have about the caller to direct them to each department. ACD recognizes that an incoming call comes from a number registered to an existing customer. Therefore, the call is forwarded to your customer service department before connecting to the main desk.
Call recording
The best tool for call centers to analyze call scripts, results and quality of service is the call recording feature. Call recording helps call center agents respond to customer complaints. Thus, you can easily record every conversation you have with your customers. And even if a different agent deals with any problem that your customer may experience in the future, it helps the customer better by having a good grasp of his previous conversations and complaints.
Call queue
Once you have a call queue, the waiting process becomes much more bearable. The call queue has a very simple working principle; queues incoming calls instead of sending them directly to voicemail. An automatic greeting message informs the customer that they are in the queue and gives an estimated waiting time. By configuring the call queue, customers can listen to music or learn about the business. You can make call queues appear shorter than they really are by filling in the gap from the start of the call to connecting with an agent.
Dashboards and call analytics
It’s crucial for your cloud call center software to offer real-time reporting and analytics. Because the only way to measure the success of your call center is reporting. An ideal call center software should show call center metrics such as inquiry type, call volume, average call duration, and customer responsiveness. But it's also important to check if your call center phone system can separate these metrics by agent. So that you can analyze your agents' performance more deeply and analyze the productivity levels of your staff.
Customer satisfaction surveys
Getting feedback from your customers with built-in customer satisfaction surveys is one of the best ways to gather data. Customer satisfaction surveys are automated messages sent after every customer support call. With these surveys, callers are asked to rate the communication performance of the representative. Satisfaction surveys are one of the best ways to find out if you are providing a good experience to your customers. It is also an important guide for how you should improve your support service.
Predictive dialer
Predictive dialer is one of the best types of automation to look for when upgrading your call center. The predictive dialer uses artificial intelligence to predict which phone number an agent will call. Instead of waiting for the customer's phone number to be typed correctly, the system predicts the rest of their number to connect the call in seconds.