You want your customers to have a great experience when they call you, but have you taken the appropriate steps to make that happen? The easiest way to ensure an enjoyable, highly personalized experience, is by installing a Contact Center Solution. Today’s AI-powered contact center solutions have omni-channel capabilities – they tie in every form of communication your sales staff uses – voice, chat, text and email. So your team can meet your new customers wherever they happen to be shopping – your website, your social media pages or email newsletters.
So, how do you choose which one?
There are hundreds of solutions on the market. Here are some of the most useful and common features available in contact center systems. The best method to determine the right solution for you is to identify features in three categories – Must Have, Nice to Have and Unnecessary.
Some basic features can make a surprisingly big difference when it comes to running a contact center. To give you a better idea, here are some of the most useful and common features available in contact center systems:
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
As you’ve probably experienced firsthand, getting transferred from department to department is annoying. Therefore, ACD automatically routes your callers to relevant individuals cutting down on wasted time and stress. ACD systems distribute calls according to user-specified criteria, such as sending the call to a phone that is idle, or sending calls about billing to the accounting department, etc. Nearly all contact center systems have some form of ACD. They vary from simple push-button virtual operators to those that use caller ID or voice recognition.
Contact Center Monitoring and Analytics
Analyzing call durations, costs, and other useful metrics can help your supervisors and managers make informed decisions on issues such as employee performance, staffing and training needs. In fact, the best systems offer real-time statistics, letting you know what’s going on in the contact center second by second. Additionally, historical reporting allows you to compile hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual statistics for long-term analysis.
Call Recording
Useful for training and monitoring, call recording allows your supervisors and operators to record and store phone calls as audio files on the server. However, the storage requirements for call recording can be quite large so adding a cloud hosting solution may be helpful.
Contact Management
These systems enable different calls to be tagged and stored with relevant information attached to the call file. This permits better management of customers, as it provides historical records of all calls by an individual account holder.
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
CTI systems use desktop PCs as telephone systems. These software packages enable a desktop computer to serve and display all call-related functions. These include providing caller information, routing calls to other workstations, and controlling the phone system. Most contact center systems utilize some form of CTI. Usually, a simple USB headset can turn a standard PC that’s running CTI into a complete contact center workstation.
Workstation Recording
Workstation data recording enables you to make a movie of what’s happening on an operator’s screen. The recording can be analyzed to learn how operators are using the system, what tricks they know that could help others, and what problems they’re having that could be addressed.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR uses voice-recognition software to allow your callers to route themselves to specific departments. IVRs vary in sophistication-from the very basic, which enable simple routing functionality, to systems that allow your customers to access their accounts. At the high end, IVR empowers your customers to serve themselves, reducing the workload on human operators.
Live Call Coaching
This allows one of your supervisors to interact with an operator without the caller hearing, thereby enabling training and mentoring.
Performance Evaluation
By monitoring an operator’s performance, your managers can identify gaps in training and areas where your operators need improvement. This type of evaluation can create reports, graphs, and other data while scoring an operator’s performance.
Predictive Dialer
If your agents make a lot of outbound calls, a predictive dialer enables a list of phone numbers to be called simultaneously. So, your operators are connected only when someone picks up. These systems can save your team a lot of time and prevent your operators from having to wait for a call to be answered. Predictive dialers also monitor the availability of operators to ensure that calls aren’t made when there are no operators available to route the call if someone answers.
Once you have rated these features in the three categories, contact My Resource Partners’. One of our technololgy advisors will review your rating chart and gather some additional information about your current environment. Then they will quickly connect you with the Contact Center providers who best match your criteria. Instead of wasting months researching providers, our agents can help you select the Contact Center Solution that is right for your company in a matter of days.
