Customer service is not an easy job. Demand, priorities, and expectations keep on evolving in this segment of the business. Of course, technology also evolves altogether to support the required expectation of customers to deliver the delighting customer experience. Still, these evolutions bring in different challenges in the call center such as:
- Performing more with more limited resources
- Pressure to adopt the latest tools such as adding WhatsApp as a mode of communication
- Increasing expectations of customers
- Pandemic and other unforeseen challenges
- And many more
Here are the top 9 features of call center solutions that can help you surpass all challenges:
1. Omnichannel Communication
Customers prefer to connect with agents immediately and without getting charged for the communication. Moreover, modern customers prefer modern communication channels. Thus, to overcome various challenges, call centers should adopt an omnichannel call center solution to overcome different challenges.
2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
An Interactive Voice Response is the first point of contact for customers. As soon as the call of a customer is connected, he hears audio from an IVR. It assists call centers to attend calls from the customers immediately. Moreover, customers can also attend calls from customers round the clock even if there are no agents available to take the call, an IVR can give primary information 24*7. It communicates with customers through voice messages or DTMF keypad tones and provides customized responses to callers. In other words, an IVR serves as a virtual attendant or receptionist. It greets the caller of a call center with a personalized greeting prompt.
It helps in overcoming challenges related to customer expectation to get connected quickly to achieving more in less and many related resources.
3. Skill-based Call Routing
Routing incoming calls according to the skill-set of the agents is a feature in call center solution, known as skill-based routing. To aid this, agents are classified according to different skills such as demographics, language, expertise, region, etc. IVR communicates with the callers to learn about their concerns and the type of resolution needed. Then, according to the caller’s input, IVR routes the call to the most skilled agent who meets the requirements of the caller. This feature assures to connect customers with the agent with the required skills, thus, resolves customer concerns as well as increase customer satisfaction.
4. Automatic call distribution (ACD)
Automatic call distribution assures calls are routed automatically to the right agent whereby reducing the call queues and waiting time of callers. It is essential for all call centers as it assists in the well-organized customer call management. When your call center solution is set up, you can effortlessly personalize the criteria or sequence of call routing for customers. You can change it later based on the customer requirements or call volume. There are different ways ACD routes calls such as:
- Location-based
- Agent performance-based
- To the most idle agent
- And more
5. CRM integration
Call center software can be integrated with any CRM software such as vTiger, Salesforce, SugarCRM, Zoho, etc. Call center CRM integration offers a 360-degree viewpoint of the customer that benefits agents deliver personalized responses to the callers. Whenever someone calls at the call center, an agent can view all customer/prospect information. This information will assist busy agents to become more systematic, productive, and powerful.
6. Live Call Transfer
This feature lets agents transfer calls to a manager or another agent directly from their softphones, without hanging up the call. If an agent is incapable to resolve a concern, he can simply transfer the call to someone he thinks is capable to resolve this concern. This will further decrease the call waiting time of the client as well as improves customer experience. Call center solutions offer blind call transfer and attended call transfer and agents can use the one as per the nature of the call.
7. Call Tracking
Call tracking is a call center software feature, which tracks all calls. Managing a call center by keeping both customers and agents satisfied is a difficult job. Even if technology has made it simple. Call tracking feature helps call centers to track calls to make sure all calls are being acknowledged, and observe the performance of the individual agents. Now, agents are not under constant orders. When agents know their calls are tracked, they will give the best performance.
8. Voice logging
Voice logging aka Call recording feature of a call center solution records all or predefined outgoing or incoming calls. It is necessary to monitor the quality of calls as it facilitates call centers to listen to agents remotely. Voice logging benefits call centers to coach agents to meet the set a call quality benchmark. Furthermore, if any conflict occurs between an agent and a customer, call recording can support you solve the customer concerns efficiently while further assisting brand building.
9. Reports
Reports show call volume during peak hours, new and returning callers, the number of calls received and missed, traffic originating from various regions, and different essential insights. Reports are vital when scheduling agents, making decisions, and measuring performance.
Concluding notes
As time changes, challenges to all industries increase. However, the technology always comes to rescue you. We have developed different call centers solutions to assist call centers to overcome all challenges and gain a competitive edge. Let’s discuss more.
