Contact center software is an integrated platform that automates a contact center’s core functions, such as routing & handling customer contacts, forecasting volume, reporting on key metrics, and scheduling, developing & motivating customer service agents. The best cloud contact center software is the one that enables contact centers to achieve their customer experience goals while closely managing labour costs. It is important to choose the right software solution that can align with your business goals.
Here are the key features that you must look for in contact center software:
Automatic Contact Distributor (ACD)
The primary role of the automatic contact distributor is to route incoming voice & digital (such as chat, email, social) interactions. This may sound like a straightforward task, but practically it is quite complex. ACD can be programmed to route according to a series of user-defined rules such as the number dialled, information collected during the upfront menu, agent’s skills & availability, & much more.
The best cloud contact center software is the one where ACDs which can perform omni-channel routing using the universal queue to holistically route contacts from all the supported channels. Additionally, you should look for ACDs that can integrate easily with your other systems and have intuitive design studios for easy rule & workflow configurations.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVRs greet & allow callers to interact with menus for self-service options. IVR solutions can gather information from customers, such as their account/customer numbers, and pass calls to the right agent as per their requirement. Additionally, the information gathered by the IVR can be passed onto the ACD for smarter routing.
The best cloud contact center software is the one that has IVRs with natural speech recognition, which enables customers to verbalize what they want. This enables them to bypass the structured menu altogether. Additionally, IVRs that have “call back” capabilities can improve customer experience by providing callers with an option of scheduling a call back from an agent rather than waiting in a long queue. Just like ACD, IVR should be easy to integrate with other systems & end-users should be able to easily configure rules & menus.
Quality Management
Quality management software offers consistency & ease of use to the processes of monitoring & evaluating interactions. These tools typically include features to make customized scorecards, record results of quality evaluations and reporting individual & team results. Quality management software solution may also include call recording features & interaction analytics solutions.
The best cloud contact center software is the one that has quality management feature which can simplify the coaching process through automated workflows & engage agents by enabling them to evaluate disputes. Look for a quality management solution that can record agent’s screens along with recording the audio calls for a more comprehensive view of each interaction.
Reporting & Analytics
Contact centers are typically so rich with data that they need robust reporting & analytics tools. Good software solution transforms data into information that helps leaders to understand performance, identify trends & make data-driven decisions.
The best cloud contact center software is the one that includes reporting tools with a plethora of out-of-the-box reports reflecting industry reporting best practices. In addition to this, they can provide end-users with the ability to configure their own dashboards so that they can monitor what’s more crucial to them. These reports & dashboards should include data from all the channels so that users can get a consolidated view of performance, and data can be easily shared with other systems & reporting tools.
Final Word
Using a rigorous software selection process is the effort that will pay off in the long run. To ensure you make a decision your business can live with for many years, start by identifying what you want to accomplish & what you need the contact center software to do to get you to your end state. Having this solid foundation will help you to ensure overall business success.
