Every business owner requires an active call center service to satisfy their needs. This office receives all customer complaints, inquiries on sales, and technical support, makes inbound and outbound calls, and solves issues relating to customers. They provide support to your customers through phone calls using specialized call center software.
With this evolution in technology, call center service runs a lot smoother in helping customers with the necessary support they need and answering their questions as regards a company’s products or services.
What Is Call Center Software?
Call center software automates and monitors incoming and outgoing calls. This software enables call centers to carry out several tasks including recording and automating call routing. However, it is one thing to invest in call center software and another thing to be able to customize your call center software to meet the needs of your business.
But before we proceed to how you can customize call center software to meet your requirements, let’s understand why you need call center software.
What Does a Call Center Software Do?
Call center software provides amazing features for the operations done by contact centers. These operations are present for either inbound or outbound call centers. Call center software aids call center agents in achieving their expectations with ease.
What Is an Inbound and Outbound Call Center?
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Inbound Call Center:
This serves as a help desk where calls from already existing customers are received. The support team assists the customers when they call to make inquiries or seek customer support.
Call center inbound provides day-to-day assistance to customers, receives sales calls, and also connects customers to the appropriate desks where their needs can be adequately met, to ensure their satisfaction.
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Outbound Call Center:
This team is responsible for making sales calls, a process which is known as cold calling. They serve a telemarketing purpose in every business or company by reaching out to potential customers in generated leads through the telephone.
Which Call Center Software Best Fits Your Business?
As a business owner, Investing in call center software is a dream come true. Aside from being a big investment, the solutions and benefits it gives businesses are worth it.
Before proceeding to get a call center for your business, let’s walk you through the two types of call center software.
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On-Premises Call Center Software:
This is also called Legacy call center software. This system requires an in-house server which is kept at physical locations for its operations.
With this type of system, every maintenance and IT update is carried out manually and on-site, thereby allowing companies and business owners to exercise absolute control of their software and its operations. This On-site software does not make use of an internet connection. Rather, they make use of local phone lines to operate on incoming and outgoing calls.
This is because landlines have been proven to make quality phone calls compared to cloud-based providers as they do not require a stable internet connection to operate. Furthermore, on-premises call center software is a good choice for your business if you want to be in charge of your software, and it provides safer storage for your customer details.
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Cloud-Based Call Center Software:
This is considerably cost-effective and flexible software compared to on-premises systems. It carries out all of its functions remotely and doesn’t require a physical space to house its server. With cloud-based systems, business owners are given the financial advantage of maintenance, as they wouldn’t have to spend on maintaining it.
They also don’t need to invest lots of money in getting it, as it is mainly subscription-based. This means they only have to pay for the exact number of licenses they need for their business.
Investing in a cloud-based system puts your business at an advantage as you can employ call center agents from any part of the world. There will also be no need for your employees to work shifts or overtime because your customers will be offered round-the-clock support.
Therefore, If you want a call center software that is flexible and cheap, cloud-based software is the perfect option for your business.
Features of a Call Center Software
Call center software covers a vast range of functions that are essential to optimize the operations of every call center. Let us take a look at these functions and what each feature offers you.
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Call Center Management
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Automatic Call Routing:
This feature enables call center agents to determine who is calling and the location from which they will route the call. This process is often automatic depending on the caller’s profile or ID information.
It can also be policy-based and takes note of the details of the conversation like who is calling, and which agent is available to take the call. It also has other details like the time and day it will take place.
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Automatic Call Recordings:
This is an essential feature of a call center as it provides quality call management like recordings. Call recordings are used in training new agents for a better understanding of what is expected of them, what they are doing wrong, and how best they can improve.
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Call Queues:
Have you ever called customer support and you are placed on hold for a few minutes? You might be wondering how and why they do it. This feature serves that purpose.
Call queues ensure that customers do not hang up when they are kept on hold. It organizes agents into queues depending on set-down logic. It also routes callers to available agents that will serve them better.
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Reconnection:
This feature ensures that when a caller loses connection to their server while conversing with an agent, they will automatically be routed back to the agent that was of assistance to them when they reconnect.
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Interactive Voice Responses (IVR):
This feature comprises automated messages, greetings, and service prompts that are sent to the customer while they’re in the queue. It takes care of the caller before and after they speak with an agent.
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Analytics:
This is a reporting feature that provides analytics and metrics that gives business owners and companies insight into the operations every call service agent provides to their customers and enables them to rate the performance.
This feature reports the number of calls per day, average call duration, abandonment rate, waiting times, level of service, and lots more.
This data can be customized into pictorial forms like charts and graphs to enable business people to understand and improve their call center team’s performance and productivity, along with their individual agent’s conversations with your callers.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration:
This enhances the performance of your call center’s system by integrating it with third-party applications using computer telephony integration (CTI). This secures caller information, processes and analyzes customer data as well as improves customer rapport meaning and call service.
This gives agents the necessary information they need to satisfy their customers. Some of the efficient CRM tools that can be integrated are Zendesk, Genesys, salesforce, and lots more.
Invest in a Call Center Software
Investing in a call center software that fits your requirements is one step into expanding and increasing your business’s productivity. Customizing your call center software will provide your business with lots of benefits because it will be able to meet specific requirements for which you got it. Thereby, improving the quality of service to satisfy your customers.
FAQs
What is a Call Center app?
Call center applications are a type of customer service application that gives customers access to support from a call center via phone calls.
What are CRM tools?
These are customer relationship management tools that support marketing, sales, and customer service functions and operations for your business.
