Last Updated on: 22nd November 2023, 08:01 am
Having the right call centre systems is a critical first step in ensuring an organisation delivers an excellent customer experience, but it can be very challenging to choose the right call centre technology, implement it, and optimise it for the best results. There is much that call centre technology can do to improve operations. The first step is to ensure that critical technologies are in place to meet the basic needs of customers and to support call centre systems.
The following are the eight best call centre tools you can use in your business to deliver the best customer experience, which focus on the functionality of call centre software. When exploring the acquisition of these tools, it may be more effective to select a platform that has already integrated many of these technologies together, but you can also get them separately to fit your business’ specific needs.
Contact routing software
Contact routing software is a significant update of automatic call distribution technology, allowing customers who contact organisations through a variety of channels (voice, email, chat, etc.) to be directed to customer service agents efficiently. A key component of contact routing software is the skills-based routing, which provides the ability to route contacts to agents who have the most appropriate skill sets to handle specific transactions. The two main advantages of this call centre technology, then, are that the contacts move to agents rather than agents moving through systems to access contacts; and also that the metrics can be tracked and reported, including volumes, response times, average handling times, etc.
Quality Management Software
Quality management software, including call recording and call monitoring tools, provides a way to manage, track and report quality metrics. Call recording software provides the ability to record a sample or 100% of the customer’s interaction with a call centre. These recordings provide an audit trail of all customer-agent interactions that can be used as part of a quality monitoring/feedback program or as a call centre tool to review historical customer interactions. This software provides the ability to review recorded calls, complete pre-loaded forms and provide performance feedback to agents, along with key reports and metrics. Recorded call analysis provides a much more efficient process than waiting and listening to live calls.
Voice/text analysis software
Voice/text analysis software provides the chance to listen to and analyse the customer’s actual voice giving you the ability to select sample calls to find conversations related to specific keywords or types of queries. Real-time voice/text analysis provides the ability to identify calls where a customer’s tone or voice inflection means that the contact may have to be escalated to a supervisor, all in real time.
Personnel Management Software
Personnel management software is the call centre system that supports agent scheduling. This software analyses historical information, along with attachments provided by the contact centre, to provide forecasted volumes, projected staffing needs, and optimised schedules. In addition, personnel management software provides real-time tools to support the adjustment of resources to variations in predefined activities.
CRM Management Software
CRM software provides the ability to track all interactions with a customer, including customer calls, customer purchases, and more in a single repository. Having this type of information provides data about a customer’s journey with an organisation. This can be used to analyse the value of specific customers, which can then be used to present relevant service offerings when contacting a call centre. On a macro level, analysis can be performed to help understand why customers are communicating with the call centre in the first place.
Integrated Voice Response Software
Integrated voice response software enables customer self-service during a telephone interaction. Tone call centre technology is the most common method, in which a caller presses specific keys on their phone to get an answer to their question.
Improvements in speech recognition software allow customers to speak their selections instead of pressing a key on their phones. Regardless of whether customers use tone or speech to request information, the structure and number of menus should be limited to reduce customer effort and improve utilisation.
Outbound Dialling Software
Outbound dialling software provides tremendous efficiency by better preparing agents before a contact and eliminating non-value-added activities during the call process -e.g., dialling phones, waiting for a customer to respond. Depending on the size of the company and the volume and types of calls made, there are different kinds of diallers that could be effective: power, preview, predictive.
Post-Contact Survey Software
Post-contact survey software automatically questions customers after an interaction with the call centre. The technology is available where the post-contact survey system can ask the customer to stay on the phone after an interaction or can call a customer again after an interaction with the contact centre.
