![[Ultimate Guide] How to Set Up a Call Center in 2022?](https://cdn.c-zentrix.com/blog-images/the-checklist-for-your-call-center-setup.jpeg)
Call Center, Omnichannel
[Ultimate Guide] How to Set Up a Call Center in 2022?
Contact centers are frequently the first potential point of contact for every business with its customers. Customers become irate when minor issues go unresolved. It occurs when a company lacks competent customer service to swiftly respond to inquiries and carry out the demands. Contact center software can handle customer conversations originating primarily from voice calls. It supports agents' workforce management, call management (both incoming and outgoing), and call analytics tracking. A team of individuals manages all telephone calls at a contact center, and the contact center serves as the focal point for all client conversations that take place via phone or at best email.
The number of customers who will choose phone-based customer service is expected to be high even in 2023. This functionality is a key component of some of the best contact center technologies. The live and immediate response of phone conversations with fosters confidence between customers and customer support representatives. As per Deloitte, 62% of organizations view customer experience provided through the contact center as a competitive differentiator.
A contact center software is a system with several features that are designed to handle all facets of a contact center's operations. Call center software can assist you in streamlining your customer support to provide top-notch service, whether you handle incoming, outgoing, or a combination of both sorts of calls.
You'll need efficient contact center software that enables your contact center agents to perform their best to provide consumers with top-notch support.
Content:
1. What is Contact Center Software?
2. Checklist to pick the best contact center software
Contact center software is a set of tools businesses can employ to improve operations, boost productivity, and deliver better customer service overall.
The contact center software can be used by organizations in healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, retail, technology, BPO, consulting, business services, and other sectors.
Among the many variations and functions of contact center software are auto-dialers, contact center monitors, call accounting solutions, call analytics, predictive dialers, computer telephony integration (CTI), interactive voice response (IVR), and automatic call distributor. Before making a choice, it's also critical to comprehend the distinctive qualities that each one offers.
Before you choose a call center software for your business, it is crucial to consider the fundamental features it offers. It is advisable to select one that has all the features that meet your requirements because only you know the needs of your company. Consideration of these extra elements must also take into account long-term objectives.
By ensuring that calls are automatically directed to the appropriate agent, automatic call distribution helps to shorten client wait times. One important capability of call center software is queue management. The ACD routes the call to the specific queue and the call waits in the queue till the agent becomes available. Every contact center must have it since it facilitates the orderly management of consumer calls. There are several methods for routing calls, including performance-based routing, location-based routing, directing calls to idle systems, least occupied routing, etc.
IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is an automated phone system that enables callers to communicate with a computer-operated telephone system via Dial Tone (DTMF) input from a keypad or voice response. It can route calls or even offer choices for self-service. Incoming phone calls are managed by IVRs, which first gather data on the client inquiry before automatically routing the call to the appropriate department. Customers are typically given a pre-recorded message outlining the menu options.
IVR builder is a necessary feature that enables the customers to build their IVR workflow, integrate with 3rd party APIs, and keep the IVR updated as per their needs.
A dialer is a contact center software that automates contacting a list of customer numbers and documentation of the call results in a lot easier. The platform streamlines the outbound calling process for your agents and eliminates the need for manual dialing. For the contact center industry, every piece of customer data is priceless. To provide consumers with a seamless experience, dialers have now become an integral part of every organization.
1. Predictive Dialer: The predictive dialer gathers information, forecasts the agent's availability, calculates the typical call answer time, and makes outgoing calls just before the agent is available. After continuously dialing multiple contacts, finally, when a contact responds, it transfers the call to the most qualified agent. This is one of the best solutions to connect professionals with prospects. The pacing ratio – dialer calling rate gets automatically adjusted with the connected calls.
2. Progressive Dialer: A Progressive Dialer will only dial one number for each agent. Typically, the pacing ratio is set to 1:1. It will wait for the agent to finish their current call before dialing the next number on the list. The dialer makes sure that an agent is accessible right away to manage the engagement as soon as the consumer picks up the phone, therefore abandoned calls are few. This means that progressive dialing is a very customer-friendly strategy.
3. Preview or Manual Dialer: A preview dialer enables contact center agents to see the next call on the list before a call. This lets them prepare and decide whether they should move on to a call or not. It can be beneficial for crucial sales when some research is required to improve the chances of success.
1. Convert Leads to Customers
2. Increased efficiency
3. Improves agent productivity
4. Reduced idle time and downtime
5. Better average talk time
6. No manual dialing errors
A very useful and must-have feature of the call center software is call recording. This is also called a voice logger. All calls (inbound/outbound/blended) get recorded as saved as soon as the call is completed and disposed of. The application allows for on-site or cloud storage of recordings.
This function is crucial for businesses with compliance mandates which might need to access recordings for quality control and review. For some industry verticals like BFSI, this is a must for any customer escalation and audit purpose.
Voice logger or Call recording comes default with the CZ Contact center software. All call recordings are available in .mp3 format.
This feature provides the entire recording of the screen when the call is active. The supervisor can view the agent’s desktop and the various applications, and browser tabs the agent goes through during the call. It helps to understand the training need of the agents if they take more time in finding information when the customer is over the call.
For the financial process, businesses need a screen recording feature to avoid any non-compliance.
Do you think you can easily win over a customer's trust with just a pre-written script? Among the many factors that play a crucial role in achieving customer loyalty, a proactive response is one of them.
Call whispering is a feature that lets supervisors hear what clients are asking and give an immediate response so the agent can deal with the issue at hand.
When you activate the call whispering option, the customer only hears the representative's voice but the agent can hear the manager's voice as well. Ensuring smooth customer handling.
The language, tone, and interactions of contact center representatives affect how satisfied customers are. Thus, the call whispering feature allows managers to live coach agents when there's a need. It is to essentially give relevant suggestions and solutions to save themselves from any escalation.
There are situations when the call needs to be handled by the supervisor or team leader. With the call barging feature, the supervisor can directly speak to an agent and the client. It makes sense for the supervisor to barge in when the client is getting upset and you don’t have a skilled agent on the other end to handle the call.
Customers can use this feature while they are on hold to leave voicemail messages or just enter an option to get a callback and hang up. Once the agent gets into a free state, the automatic callback phone number is dialed out. However, for VIP customers, it can skip the queue and callback the VIP number.
This feature can be used in outages or in contact centers that experience recurrent spikes in high volume.
This feature will enable call deflection to another channel like a chatbot or visual IVR. Usually, when the system is facing heavy inbound call volume, activating call deflection can transfer the load to other channels, and with the self-service capability of a chatbot or visual IVR, customers need not wait in queue for a very long time.
A request for call deflection can be added to the IVR greeting so that the customer can opt for call deflection. An SMS or WhatsApp message can be sent to the customer along with the link to the bot or visual IVR for self-service.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software refers to a solution that contact center representatives use to track customer issues, improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity. CRM systems hold customer records such as account information and contact records. Any issues related to customer service are logged within the CRM. Agents use the data in CRM systems to analyze a customer's relationship with the company to personalize customer conversations.
When CRM applications are connected with contact center technology, they are more effective at the contact center. As a result, productivity increases and the agent may concentrate more on customer service. The CRM provides the ticketing system, and issues can be automatically logged via email or manually created over a call.
With Sales CRM, leads can be automatically pushed to the dialer for an outbound campaign. The leads can be assigned to the agent and with the sticky feature, particular agents can be mapped to the particular lead so that lead ownership is with the specific sales rep.
The term "computer telephony integration" (CTI) refers to the process of connecting a contact center's phone systems to its business applications, often to provide the latter better control over call handling. Through the use of on-screen controls for telephony operations including answering and terminating calls, placing callers on hold, transferring calls, etc., agents can do all phone activities on their CTI widget, which is integrated into their business applications like CRM or Order management system, etc.
Contact center agents may effortlessly manage phone calls from these applications, thanks to CTI. Agents can have more fruitful, meaningful interactions and arrive at answers more quickly because of the unified information and sophisticated controls that are readily available at their fingertips.
On the agent's unified desktop, a pop-up displaying information about the caller is presented as calls are received. Agents have the knowledge they need to lead the conversation thanks to detailed caller information, which includes things like name, email address, location, caller history, specific needs, etc.
Screen pop-ups provide agents with the data they require to assist customers in finding solutions as rapidly as feasible. The customer won't have to wait while the agent looks up the customer's information in other databases and office software. On call completion, the call recording and call log can be pushed to the CRM or business applications, so that they can be easily reviewed at a later time.
Many times, contact centers need to send out broadcast messages to their customers for various purposes. It can be to inform of an upcoming offer or a delay in flight departure. The call blast is usually a recorded message with some IVR options. Based on the IVR response from the end user, action can be taken – like transferring to a live agent or collecting feedback. However, these can be reminder calls for an overdue premium or even for an upcoming event.
Usually, the CSAT survey is done post-call or after an activity is completed by a business-like installation or product delivered. While the survey has moved over to other channels like SMS and a web-based survey, still CSAT survey is quite popular over a phone call. A simple IVR option is created for the survey and the end user is called to provide their response by entering a particular number from the keypad. With DTMF input, the survey report is created and customer feedback can be used by the business to assess their service quality.
Speech analytics brings the power of AI to the contact center. It can capture the streaming voice data and convert it into text. This text is the transcription of the call on the dual channel. Speech analytics can help contact centers by replacing the manual process of having a human listen to and process information. Instead, the software reads through the content of customer calls automatically. A customer service organization can use inbound call monitoring features to assess language and voice inflections to track emotions about a product, service, company, or even the agent.
Analyzing a customer's speech speed or the presence of emotion or stress in their voice can be part of this. Additionally, speech analytics can recognize keyword patterns, silence duration, talk-over (agent and customer speaking at the same time), product features, churn intent, and competitor names, enabling quick reporting on trends and problems with the customer experience.
Speech analytics is essential for compliance-based organizations that must adhere to stringent security guidelines. With the help of this feature, the contact center can engage customers in proactive ways, reduce compliance problems, and foster repeat business.
Contact centers can use sentiment analysis to identify and classify opinions about the products or services offered. Sentiment analysis helps contact centers understand the sentiment of the customer based on the interaction (phone or chat interaction)
This is a proactive way of collecting customer feedback and also the sentiment trend (how the customer sentiment changed during the interaction) is a leading indicator of the training needs of the agent. Sentiment analysis can also be tagged with the conversation so that it is easy to understand which conversations did not go well and if any actions need to be taken.
Reporting and analytics provide a complete understanding of the Contact center operation. Usually, all the key operating parameters are displayed on the dashboard.
- Total Call Answered
- Call abandoned
- Call wait time
- The longest time in the queue
- Average Handling Time
- Average Wait Time
- Call Detail Records
- Agent Login report.
- Lead-wise call report
- Abandon call report
- IVR containment report
These reports can be pulled out for the campaign-specific, agent-specific, disposition-specific, start and end date, and other parameters.
A customer service team's primary duty is to create enduring, loyal relationships with their clients. However, maintaining happy customers is essential to ensuring the same. One way to accomplish this is by using a helpdesk ticketing system.
All issues raised by a customer during the call can be logged into the Helpdesk CRM and these issues can be assigned to a different team for resolution. Based on the ticket type, SLA can be provided so that in breach of SLA the ticket is escalated to the next level. Tickets can be automatically created over an email sent to the helpdesk and the docket number is auto-generated.
With the use of CZ Helpdesk CRM, your business will be able to proactively monitor all customer inquiries and issues, making sure that none of them are missed.
Conclusion:
Considering the boom of customer support in 2023, the above-mentioned features will assist you in selecting the contact center software that is perfect for your company. It is prudent to tabulate the capabilities and your business requirements and then map them against the providers. For further assistance, to help in your selection and comparison, do contact team C-Zentrix.
