The top features your outbound call center software needs to have.
Investing in the right call center software for your business has never been more important. But, choosing the right platform can be a little daunting if you don’t know to look for.
Recent statistics show that the global call center software market is projected to be worth a whopping $30.74 billion by the end of 2027. So, you need to be mindful of your software choices to ensure your call center technology meets your customer service needs.
It doesn't make sense to spend a fortune on the best call center software if it won't fully support your team's ability to provide customer service effectively.
To help you make the right call, we’ve compiled a list of the top 12 features to look for in call center software. We'll extensively cover each feature, how it can benefit your company, and why it's an important part of the customer service experience.
Before we look at the features to look for in the best call center software, it’s important to understand what it is and how it can boost your business’s productivity.
Call center software is any software application designed to help businesses manage their customer service and contact center operations.
It provides users with the ability to manage outbound and inbound customer interactions, empowering them to streamline important processes such as customer service ticketing, call logging, and reporting.
With a centralized system that brings all of these elements together, call center software can help your business increase efficiency, saving precious time and money. It allows your team to easily manage calls, track customer satisfaction and feedback, record customer data, and more.
In addition to these benefits, call center software relays call center metrics to businesses, delivering valuable insights into customer behavior. You can use these metrics to develop personalized experiences tailored to each customer’s needs.
A call center phone system depends on the features and capabilities of the specific software in use. However, all call centers use a basic structure involving an audio gateway, ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) queue, phones, and software.
The audio gateway connects calls to the correct agent or department. When a customer initiates a call, it enters this gateway, where the ACD queue determines its destination. The ACD queue is a system of rules and processes determining which agent should handle the call.
The phones used by agents have specialized features for receiving, transferring, and managing customer calls. These phones are connected to the software, which allows agents to interact with customers using features like warm transfers or voicemail greetings.
In short, you can use call center software to manage all of these elements. It allows your managers to set up routing rules, view detailed reports on your agents’ performance, and connect other external communication systems. It also provides your agents with the tools they need to handle customer calls effectively.
There are several reasons why using call center software is a prudent decision for your business. They’re known to:
You don't need complicated hardware like the traditional PBX system to use call center software. All that's required is a computer and headset for each agent. This eliminates the need for costly hardware, which can be difficult to maintain and expensive to replace.
With the automation of mundane tasks like customer data entry, agents can focus on delivering excellent customer service. It also allows customers to connect with the right agent quickly, resulting in a far smoother customer experience.
Call center software helps you provide customers with personalized and efficient service. It can be configured to route calls to the correct agent based on priority or type of query, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
Using top-quality small business call center software ensures that customer data is accurate and up-to-date. This means that your agents have the latest information on hand to answer customers’ queries quickly and accurately.
The agents can also access historical records of customer interactions with other departments, making for seamless omnichannel experiences for customers.
Call center software solutions offer enhanced safety features, such as the ability to block calls from certain area codes or numbers. This helps you protect your employees, customers, and business information by preventing malicious callers from accessing confidential data.
One of the biggest benefits of call center software is that it can save you a ton of money.
By automating customer service processes, you can reduce the number of agents needed to handle calls and process orders.
Additionally, this system reduces costs associated with employee training and onboarding since agents are automatically assigned tasks according to their skill sets.
Traditional call centers had to rely on surveys sent to customers after the call was completed. These surveys were often slow and expensive to implement.
Modern call center software is far more advanced, empowering your agents to conduct customer satisfaction surveys during and after a customer interaction. This gives you real-time feedback on customer service experience and the ability to make improvements as needed.
Now, let’s run through some important features to consider when evaluating software for call centers.
One of the most important features of call center software is campaign management. This feature allows you to easily create and manage campaigns, assign tasks to agents, and track performance metrics.
With a good campaign management system, you can monitor the progress of each campaign and make adjustments to improve outcomes. You can also use this feature to track customer service metrics, such as average handle time, abandoned call rate, and customer satisfaction.
Automatic call distribution (ACD) is a key feature in modern call center platforms. It allocates incoming calls automatically to the most appropriate agent based on criteria such as skill level and availability.
ACD also helps improve customer service by ensuring that customers are connected to the right agent for their queries quickly and efficiently. By routing customer calls to agents with the relevant skills and knowledge, call center software can help improve customer satisfaction and reduce wait times.
Automated voicemail is a great way to ensure that your customers are attended to quickly and efficiently. It allows your agents to be more productive by automatically sending a pre-recorded message when they are unable to answer the phone.
Automated voicemail can also provide customers with important information before they even speak to an agent. This can help them resolve their issues faster without having to wait for an agent’s assistance.
Agents should have the ability to set an automated callback for customers with an estimated time of follow-up and also be able to create offsite tasks that can remind agents of callbacks at a later date.
Scheduled callbacks are a great way to make sure that customers don’t fall through the cracks and that agents have the ability to follow up on their conversations. Additionally, having this feature ensures that all of your customer's inquiries are followed up on as quickly as possible.
DNC (Do Not Call) lists are a key feature for any call center software. DNC list management allows agents to manually add numbers to a do-not-call registry and filter out those numbers from receiving any future contact. This helps you comply with laws and regulations and avoid annoying customers who don’t want to be contacted, which can greatly reduce an agent’s fear of cold-calling.
A DNC list feature should include the ability to add numbers, remove numbers and view a comprehensive list of all the numbers on a do-not-call registry. It should also facilitate importing and exporting lists from external sources.
A cadence is a series of automated, personalized calls that are sent to customers over a specified period of time. It combines various features such as recordings, surveys, and customer feedback to create a personalized call experience. With this feature, agents can customize their own cadences and save them for future use.
Cadence calls have become increasingly important for businesses to reach their customers in a way that’s timely and cost-effective. With this feature, agents can send follow-up calls to customers after they’ve reached out with inquiries or complaints. This helps increase customer engagement and loyalty, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
Dispositions offer a way for contact center agents to categorize the outcome of each customer interaction accurately. This provides supervisors and managers with valuable insight into how their workforce is performing and supplies data for advanced analytics.
Dispositions can be customized with labels that reflect your business’s unique operations and shore up gaps in processes or procedures. When looking for a call center platform, ask about the kind of dispositions that can be configured and how user-friendly they are.
Skills-based routing is one of the features you shouldn’t overlook when evaluating software for call centers. This feature allows customer service teams to quickly assess customer needs and route them to the most appropriate agent based on their skill set.
This feature is a game-changer for teams that handle high volumes of calls and need to streamline the customer service process.
Another key feature of call center software is its ability to integrate with other customer relationship management (CRM) systems. By connecting data from several different sources, agents can get a complete picture of their customers and provide them with personalized service.
Integrating your CRM with your call center software helps improve the customer experience, as well as helps to increase customer loyalty. It allows agents to quickly look up customer data, track customer interactions, and view customer history in one centralized location.
Additionally, CRM integration can be used to track call center metrics, such as response times and customer satisfaction scores.
Automated reporting allows you to quickly generate reports and analyze data in real-time. This is essential because it gives you better insight into your operations at any given time.
With automated reporting capabilities, you can monitor agents and teams and track customer satisfaction scores and response times to improve call center performance. This aids in identifying potential issues and equips you to make the necessary changes in order to improve customer service.
Additionally, automated reporting enables you to track key metrics like average handle time and first call resolution rate.
Dynamic lead routing is a must-have feature for any call center system. It ensures that calls are routed to the most productive staff and provides maximum efficiency. This feature gives supervisors control over how leads are distributed among teams and the ability to monitor individual performance levels.
Dynamic lead routing helps ensure that all customers get the same level of service, regardless of their location or even their language. Plus, it empowers supervisors to assign callers to agents with specific skills and qualifications, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.
Last, but certainly not least, your call center software should offer full-time customer support. Regardless of the time you encounter a problem, you need the ability to contact the customer service team to get the problem resolved as quickly as possible.
A reliable support team ensures minimal downtime, which in turn results in increased customer satisfaction and improved productivity.
When shopping for the best call center software for your business, the features outlined above should be on your must-have list. From dynamic lead routing to customer support and automated reporting, these features can help make running a call center much smoother and efficient.
Use this article as a guide to ensure that you choose the right system for your business.
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