Most call center executives, supervisors, and leaders realize the importance of having a call center software that meets today’s customers’ needs. Forrester’s analyst has mentioned that voice is the most preferred channel, used by 73% of the callers to address their concerns, raise their queries, or seek assistance from the customer service reps.
Are you looking for a call center software that has just the right tools to serve your customers, and help you streamline your customer acquisition process? You have landed on the right page. Read along as I tell you how to choose the best call center software for your business.
It is a priority for businesses to deliver an unmatched service to their customers. And you cannot do that without a call center software.
Before you choose a call center software, tick off the following checklist to not miss on any critical feature:
1. Evaluating your business needs:
If your competitor uses software, it doesn’t mean that it will be the right fit for your business. Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed most companies to operate remotely, you need to evaluate type of software that your business needs, such as:
- Remote contact center solution
- On-premise call center software
- Cloud call center software
- Hybrid call center solution
Choose software that perfectly fits your business requirements considering various factors like cost, scalability, integration, deployment time, etc.
2. Must have call center software features:
Now that you have decided on type of software for your business, you need to carefully examine the features that will help your sales and service reps to benefit from. Consider the following features:
- Intelligent IVR: With a customizable IVR, you can create a seamless journey for your customers, helping them find answers to their queries even without human intervention. You can design a custom IVR flow to help the customers reach the right agents without wasting their time.
Sometimes, the customers get frustrated while waiting for a long time in the queue. But, you can easily customize their journey by guiding them through the right solutions.
- Automated Routing: With smart routing algorithm, you can increase your first call resolution, ensuring that the customers are given the solution to their problems instantly.
Choose from a wide range of preferred agent routing, skill-based routing, customer persona based routing, FIFO, etc., to maximize the efficiency of your business.
- Dialer Software for Outbound Call Center: For your diverse business needs, you need a call center software solution that has automated dialer. While an autodialer takes care of dialing the contacts in the leas list, the agents can focus on preparing themselves for each call.
With preview dialer, the agents get a preview of the customer details that helps them modify their script according to each persona.
Similarly, Predictive and Preview Dialers helps increase business efficiency, saving agents’ time and efforts.
- Real-time Monitoring Tools: The supervisors must get real-time insights into different campaigns so that they can make well informed decisions without any delay.CR
With comprehensive monitoring tools, the supervisors can keep a track of agents’ productivity such as login hours, break duration, average handling time, number of calls handled, queue/campaign performance, etc.
Additionally, the supervisor can listen to live calls silently to monitor the agents’ performance such as language proficiency, ability to resolve customer complaints, adherence to the script, etc. They can also whisper to the agents to provide them with on-call assistance, thus increasing the first call resolution rate.
3. Flexibility & Scalability:
While selecting the perfect solution for your business you need to ensure it offers you flexibility & scalability without compromising on any feature. For instance, if you wanted to add or remove more agents, it should not be a complicated task for you. With minimum involvement of IT department and without worrying about operational overheads, you should be able to scale your business.
You must ask your call center software provider about the following things:
- Is the software easy to use?
- How long does it take for business to go up and running with this software?
- What is the cost for adding additional agents?
- Is the solution customizable for your business specific needs?
4. CRM Integration:
Now that you have carefully examined the must have features in a call center software, you should also be aware about it’s compatibility with your in-house or third-party CRM. To truly transform your brand into a profit making business, you need a software that seamlessly integrates with your CRM application.
With this integration, you can provide your agents with the ease of delivering contextual conversations while improving their productivity. Your agents won’t have to struggle with excel sheets to find relevant customer information. They can access the information in a sigle and intuitive interface without switching between multiple tabs.
For instance, if some notes are added as an outcome of a call, the agents can refer to these notes when the customer reaches out to them the next time. This becomes a game changer for your team to perform exceptionally well.
