How to Choose the Best Call Center Software for your Company
At some point or another, looking for the best software for your call center becomes a top priority.
Think about it, the secret to an efficient call center lies in your ability to provide your teams with the best tools.
One of the main tools for a call center, besides telephone obviously, is the solutions you will choose to work with. Indirectly, call center solutions support your business growth on so many levels:
- Improving customer satisfaction. Customer’s satisfaction is a cornerstone for every business. That is why it is so important to identify customer’s frustration points and areas for improvement.
- Improving staff working conditions. Being a call center agent can be very stressful since they must deal with a very important workflow which also means a lot of pressure. Providing your employees with effective solutions can help reduce stress and fatigue while boosting productivity.
As a matter of fact, both factors will contribute to improving your global results.
Find a software that meets your company’s needs
First of all, one thing you must be aware of is that the perfect call center software solution does not exist. What is good for a company might not be as good for yours.
Do you imagine purchasing software and finding out it is not adapted to your activity?
This means that before choosing a call center software for good, you need to determine your business profile. This step will help you list your needs out and highlight the features that will be useful to your teams.
Determining your company’s profile includes:
- Identifying your activity and what your customer might be reaching out to you for,
- The demand. Your choice will be influenced by whether your teams must manage a high call volume or not,
- Your working team’s size and the number of centers.
With this mere information, you’ll find out the features you need, and which type of software is more convenient for your situation among on-premises, cloud-based and hosted software.
Call Center Software must-haves
As we mentioned previously, your software must be adapted to your needs. However, there are some features that will always be useful, no matter your profile.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the functionalities you will generally need:
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR). IVR can understand dial pad sounds and voices to take an action.
- Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). ACDs are very useful to direct calls according to the customer’s selection or phone number.
- Omnichannel Support. Thanks to omnichannel support, employees can have an overview of every communication channel (phone call, email, chat, SMS and so on…) and to switch from one to another if necessary.
- Call Analytics. Basically, analytics tools track different metrics so managers can measure call campaigns’ efficiency.
- Mobility. This functionality allows incoming calls to be easily routed to your employee’s smartphone. Your employees can access the software from their smartphones no matter where they are.
- Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). This system connects a call center to the company’s internal computer system, providing the company with the ability to use all the available resources to improve customer service and call center productivity.
Of course, the most helpful features will depend on your business specific needs, but these features will be useful to any type of call center.
5 Things you need to pay attention to before choosing
Every business has its own needs and won’t find the same interest in such or such software. Still, there are important criteria that must be considered when choosing a contact center solution.
1. Integrations
Through your software, you must be able to interact with your other working tools. Therefore your call center software needs to be compatible with your CRM and marketing tools.
The dissociation of your working tools could lead to a serious loss of time and frustration for both agents and customers.
2. Reporting
It is impossible to consider working without collecting metrics and data (call length, missed calls, waiting time, transfer rates…) from your call center software. Working methods can be improved a lot from these data since it reflects your working teams daily performance.
Reporting will underline the reason why customers are calling, how you can provide them with a better service and highlight your areas for improvement.
3. Scalability
Any tools you choose to work with should be scalable because it is supposed to evolve as your business grows.
Plus, a scalable software enables you to be more autonomous by adjusting the number of profiles or to configure different features.
4. Support
If anything goes wrong, you’ll need the problem to be solved as soon as possible because it could seriously impact your service quality.
In case you are needing assistance, we strongly recommend that you opt for a provider that offers 24/7 assistance and good technical support. You should pay serious attention to the technical support offered by the providers because this is essential to make sure everything runs smoothly.
5. Pricing
Obviously, pricing shouldn’t be a deciding factor in your choice because it could drive you to choose software for the wrong reasons rather than focusing on functionality and efficiency.
Though, it still needs to be considered.
Providers usually charge fees per phone call, per minute, or per seat. That is why checking your package’s option is so important to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
Many parameters deserve to be focused on before you find out which call center software is right for you.
For instance, don’t hesitate to ask your teams how they feel about the software if they are comfortable with it and so on since they are the ones who will be working with it.
In short, choose your future software for what it will do for you rather than what it will cost you.
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https://aircall.io/
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