Call centers are an essential resource for virtually every business in today’s world. No matter which industry you serve, your customers will be looking for exceptional levels of support and guidance. Excellent CX (Customer Experience) starts with the right call center solution.
In today’s world, an effective call center needs to offer more than just excellent reliability and call quality. It also needs to provide access to exceptional scalability through the cloud, in-depth insights into customer journeys, and access to extensive opportunities for customization.
Here’s how you can make sure you’re choosing an effective call center in 2024.
Step 1: Choose Between Call Center or Contact Center
First, it’s important to identify whether you need a call center, or a contact center. Both will allow you to communicate with and support your audience. However, call centers focus on customer experiences delivered over the phone, often with both inbound and outbound calling.
Contact centers, alternatively, empower businesses to connect with customer across a wider range of channels, from SMS to web chat, social media, video, email, and more. As customer expectations skyrocket, the demand for omnichannel interactions is increasing. In fact, companies with the best omnichannel engagement strategies retain a massive 89% of their customers.
With this in mind, it’s worth determining whether restricting yourself to “call management” is a good idea. Choosing a cloud-based solution that supports multiple channels and integrations could help you to enhance customer satisfaction and increase retention rates.
Arya Zhou, Head of Global Sales, Yeastar notes: “Today’s companies need to think beyond call management when it comes to choosing technologies that deliver exceptional customer experiences. An omnichannel approach ensures businesses can adapt to meet their customers wherever they are, improving satisfaction levels, and retention rates.”
Step 2: Explore Inbound and Outbound Capabilities
Once you’ve determined whether you need a call center, or contact center, the next step is looking at the inbound and outbound capabilities of your solution. Most companies don’t just leverage their call center technology to handle incoming requests and queries from customers.
They also use this technology to reach out to potential prospects with sales opportunities, offer proactive service, and unlock opportunities. An effective call center solution should feature a number of capabilities for inbound call management. These features include things like interactive voice response, call monitoring, and call recording.
However, it’s also important to look for outbound capabilities, like proactive outbound dialing capabilities, and callback functionality.
Step 3: Identify Essential Features
Call centers and contact centers have come a long way in recent years, offering a wide range of features that help companies to manage customer interactions more effectively. While the exact features you need from your call center might vary, a few key things to look for include:
- ACD and IVR: Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technologies work together in a call center to automate the handling of calls and conversations. Leading solutions will come with intelligent call routing technologies built-in, as well as queue panels to help agents and supervisors track interactions.
- Team collaboration: Increasingly, companies are beginning to connect their contact center technologies with unified communication solutions to help boost internal collaboration. Looking for a system with call transfer, file sharing, and agent presence technology will help to unify your teams, and reduce issue resolution times.
- Monitoring tools: Monitoring tools make it easier to ensure your call center remains compliant with industry standards, and adheres to quality assurance standards. Innovative call centers offer comprehensive call monitoring and compliance tools, as well as advanced features like listen-in, whisper, and barge-in for agent training.
Step 4: Prioritize Excellent User Experience
Delivering an excellent customer experience starts with empowering and engaging your call center employees. Business leaders need to ensure their team members can access all of the resources they need to quickly address questions, and mitigate issues.
The best call center solution will enhance agent productivity and efficiency, with a flexible interface teams can access on the web, via a desktop, and even through mobile apps. It will provide access to valuable insights through wallboards, dashboards, and queue panels. Plus, it should help to ensure that agents can deliver a personalized level of service, with screen pops, and contact record displays.
At the same time, it’s worth making sure your supervisors also have the right user interface to help with managing and supporting agents. A comprehensive platform that offers insights into queue performance metrics, agent availability, and role-based feature access control can help supervisors augment and empower their teams.
Step 5: Ensure Continued Growth with Analytics
While the key features you’ll need in a call center or contact center can vary, one thing no company can afford to compromise on is insights. Analytics and reporting capabilities are essential for measuring agent performance, tracking valuable metrics, and monitoring the customer journey.
Analyzing call center metrics, with historical reports, can help you spot potential problems that could be leading to churn or dissatisfaction. Leading call center solutions can even offer comprehensive insights to agents and supervisors in real-time.
For instance, Yeastar’s call center technology empowers teams to track 17 critical performance metrics and performance of multiple queues via a unified dashboard with up-to-the-minute insights. You can even customize your screen with unique widgets, and track the KPIs that matter most to you.
Step 6: Be Ready to Evolve and Innovate
Finally, when searching for an effective call center solution, it’s important to look for opportunities to innovate and evolve in the future. Even if you don’t want to move from a call center to an omnichannel contact center today, you should be able to upgrade going forward.
Look for a vendor that will empower you to access omnichannel messaging and other communication channels as your business evolves and customer requirements change. Search for a system that can scale rapidly to support your company in the cloud, as you expand geographically. Additionally, make sure you can connect your chosen system with the essential tools you already use, from CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, to helpdesks, and productivity tools, like Microsoft Office 365 apps. Yeastar’s flexible contact center solution can integrate with a wide range of business tools, and scale to suit any business, without compromising on performance or compliance.
Choose an Effective Call Center this Year
The importance of an effective call center can’t be overlooked. Today’s consumers prioritize excellent customer experience above anything else. More than your products, services, or pricing structure, the service you provide will determine whether you can convert and retain customers.
Make sure you have a call center solution that empowers your teams to delight and engage your target audience, paving the way for continued growth.
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