Phone, e-mail, or chatbots; Modern companies offer several ways to communicate.
However, to be effective, you must use these technologies to your advantage.
For companies with dedicated support and sales teams, having a call center is a popular means to communicate for a good reason.
Telephone hotlines and call centers are the first channel customers turn to when seeking help.
On the other hand, a bad customer experience can permanently damage your company’s reputation. While positive experiences will create happy customers, that is essential for your company's growth.
Here are some of the features a call center solution must-have.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System
An IVR helps callers decide which agent they want to be connected to based on their needs. Using this system should be extremely simple and intuitive.
But why should a call center software offer IVR facilities?
With IVR, your customers can navigate through various options by pressing buttons on their phone.
The result?
Satisfied customers, representatives that can be reached at all times, and productive employees.
Skill-based Routing
Another must-have feature for any call center software is skill-based routing.
Now, how is this beneficial?
Well, it will help you save time and resources.
Interestingly, some software allows you to connect your IVR to call routing and distribution.
In this manner, the caller is first offered several options till they’re connected with the most helpful agent.
Call Recording
A common sentence we all hear when we dial a call center, “This conversation may be recorded for training purposes.”
Listening to recording conversations is now a common practice. Thus, a best call center software you use should be able to record phone calls.
Not only will these be useful for training purposes, but they can also help you increase your team productivity and customer satisfaction.
Computer telephony integration (CTI)
An ideal software will scale with your business. It is time that you say goodbye to costly tools.
How can this problem be solved?
Most call center software includes a CTI that connects your phone with your computer. A CTI can be of great benefit to your organization. It will instantly turn your computer into a virtual call center.
Desktop Notifications
No doubt, CTI’s can open up new ways of working efficiently. But, working in a call center means ensuring that you don’t miss any calls.
Now, how can this be prevented?
Most call center software provides the option of pop-up notifications on your desktop. In this way, you are always aware when you receive a call or someone transfers a call to you.
Power Dialers
Well, manually dialing a phone number hardly takes a few seconds.
On the other hand, if you observe outbound call center agents make thousands of calls each week. So, these few minutes can quickly turn into hours.
So, how can you reduce this time?
A power dialer will automatically dial stored phone numbers from a selected list. Subsequently, you can make new calls once the current one has ended.
Moreover, with a power dialer, you make 4x faster calls and makeup to 80 calls in an hour.
Thus, reducing manual work and saving your agents valuable time.
CRM Integrations
Your software must help your team work faster and efficiently.
Now, this is possible, only when your tools can talk to each other.
This does sound impossible. Right?
Well, if the tools don’t communicate, companies must either change providers or patch together solutions.
From re-training employees to correcting mistakes, these issues can cost companies lots of valuable time.
This is why having powerful but simple integrations can contribute to improved team performance.
Call Whispering & Live Coaching
There will be times, from price negotiations to quality control, your frontline agents will need your support during a call.
When dealing with difficult customers on the phone, having a colleague or manager’s can be of great help.
So, what’s the catch?
The customer at the other end can’t be aware of it.
With live coaching functionality, your colleague can secretly join your conversation and offer support.
Warm Calling & Transfer
A more way to reach out to new customers and sell your product or service is via warm calling.
With warm calling, you can reach out to people who have shown interest in your product.
Using the warm transfer option, you can talk to your colleague before transferring the call their way.
So, how is this beneficial?
This enables you to speed up on the information they need to know.
Call Center Analytics
To really understand the impact of your call center software, you need to optimize your operations. You will also need to monitor and measure your metrics.
This is where the analytic tools of your call center software come into play.
With them, you can measure and track analytics. This will help you improve team performance and make data-driven changes to your workflows.
When selecting software, you should be aware of which data you want to collect and track.
The best providers offer advanced analytics and life feed monitoring so you can track everything in real-time.
Achieving your goals and KPIs is within reach, and your agents can deliver a customer experience.
All you need to make sure is that the telephone solution you select scales with your company.
If your chosen call center software offers all the functions mentioned above, you are well-prepared to take on 2020.
