Best Contact Center Software

As soon as your business has customers, you need to make sure you have the means to answer all of their queries. In the past, setting up a phone system and having a business email address would be more than enough. But not anymore. We live in a digital world where most customers expect you to be available on all types of online communication channels, such as social media and live chat. Contact Center software allows you to manage all of this in just one platform, helping your business provide seamless and professional customer support.

Contact center software explained

Contact center software allows you to answer customer queries from all types of communication channels in one unified platform. In other words, it’s an omnichannel platform where you can answer requests from a ticket system, social media, web chat, and more. For example, a customer could initially contact you through Facebook and then decide to give you a call the next day. In that case, contact center software allows you to find the information from both interactions in one place, enabling you to deliver a seamless client support experience throughout all communication channels.

The software also comes with various tools to increase your contact center productivity, such as customer contact routing, key metrics tracking, and continuous internal communication. It allows you to direct customers to agents by their skill, check performance in real time, tag agents to specific requests, just to name a few.

There are three main types of contact centers: inbound, outbound, and virtual. While inbound contact centers focus on handling customer queries, outbound contact centers reach potential and existing customers. For outbound calls, contact center software provides dedicated features such as smart dialers to help agents be more efficient when contacting prospects. Crucially, virtual contact centers combine the services of both inbound and outbound contact centers.

It’s important to know the difference between contact center software, virtual phone systems, and call center apps to understand what a contact center platform is. While virtual phone systems are just a way to set up your phone communication lines, call center apps provide the necessary tools to handle customer calls. Usually, contact center software providers not only offer all the features found in VoIP and call center solutions, but they also add to the mix the ability to manage customer queries from all other communication channels.

Call center vs contact center

While contact and call center agents may both use headsets, it’s easy to understand the main distinction between them after reading each service’s definition. That’s just the surface however, and there are five main differences to consider:

• Channels of communication: While call center agents only speaks with clients through the phone, contact center agents are able to get in touch with consumers through all digital channels.
• Proactive vs reactive support: With the number of tools and analytics that contact centers can employ, it’s possible for them to understand buyers’ behavior, anticipate questions, and reach out before the customer initiates contact. Conversely, call centers have greater difficulty doing so. Even if  call center agents are able to anticipate problems, clients are always cautious about answering calls from unknown numbers.
• Self-service management: Contact center software offers self-service help through keyword-driven text messaging and chatbots. This way, small issues can be resolved without the need for a customer agent, which decreases costs and wait time. Although call centers usually have an IVR in place, this system is usually time-consuming, and there are still long wait times.
• 360-degree view: Only with a contact center platform can you get a 360-degree view of the customer’s journey. All information gathered throughout all the support channels can be integrated into CRM software, providing a full overview of the customer’s history at all times.
• Customer experience: Contact center software provides the tools to offer a better customer experience to your clients. In fact, due to the integration of all the information in one place, customer agents will have an easier time providing high-quality support consistently.

Essential features of contact center software

When searching for a contact center platform, there are a few core features that virtually all software solutions provide. To decide which additional features you’ll need, you’ll have to consider three main factors: managing customer requests, internal communication, and tracking client support KPIs.

Handling customer requests

For customer requests, always make sure that the contact center platform comes with all the necessary tools for call handling. Besides providing agents with the ability to forward, transfer, and merge calls, the software should also allow you to easily set up call routing, IVR, and call queues. Moreover, you should go for providers that offer a unified platform where agents can manage ticket submissions, social media messages, and web chat queries all in one place.

Internal communication tools

Contact centers need seamless internal communication as well, since clients hate to explain their issues over and over again. Therefore, it’s essential that the software allows agents to create tags and add notes to customer profiles. It’s even better if the platform comes with a built-in chat or at least lets you integrate with team collaboration software, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack. More importantly, it’s vital that the contact center software comes with built-in CRM or allows you to integrate with the one you’re already using.

Analytics

Last but not least, the software should allow you to track KPIs in real time. Managers should be able to see how many customers are waiting for support, how many agents are available, and how long it’s taking for agents to interact with clients. It’s also crucial that the manager has the necessary tools to help agents when needed with either call whispering or the ability to join the conversation. In the end, managers also need to get a helicopter view of what’s happening in the contact center making straightforward reporting a must.

Like everything in business, customer support needs to be measured. This is the only way to understand whether your contact center is running efficiently and where you need to improve. Contact center software providers offer two types of analytics dashboards: one for real-time decisions and another for mid- and long-term strategies. It’s essential to track both, as they include helpful information to understand how to improve performance. The most crucial KPIs to measure your contact center’s success are:

• Response time: How long is the customer support team taking to respond to a customer query. This can either be the time that the client spends in the call queue or how long it takes for agents to answer a Facebook message. No customer likes to wait – especially when they contact via direct channels such as phone or live chat. This KPI allows you to understand whether or not you have the necessary workforce to answer all your clients’ requests.
• Abandonment rate: The percentage of customers that give up on customer support before getting their issue fixed. Of course, it’s impossible to have an abandonment rate of 0%. Still, this metric allows you to come up with various conclusions, such as your call routing and IVR settings being too complex for consumers to grasp, not having the necessary workforce, or that a retraining session is in order.
• First contact resolution: Percentage of customers who had their problem fixed with just one interaction . Excellent customer experience means having problems solved straightaway. This metric tells you just that, and it’s perfect to understand how effective your agents are.
• Average handle time: How long it takes to handle (and solve) requests on average. It allows you to understand how efficient your guidelines are. For example, customer agents might be taking unnecessary steps each time they interact with a customer that would otherwise save them precious time.
• Customer satisfaction: While a more subjective indicator, it offers insights on all the important aspects of the customer experience journey, such as waiting time, time taken to solve an issue, and how friendly the customer support agent was. It doesn’t matter if you’re answering requests at a blazing speed if, in the end, customers aren’t happy with the support received.
• Channel mix: Mix of communication channels that your customers used to contact you. It help you decide how to better manage your customer support team and what channels to focus on.

The key benefits of a contact center software in the cloud

As customers started to become more digital, companies developed their customer support accordingly. However, most of them just added new platforms to what they already had, ending up with a disjointed and expensive system. By unifying all communication channels in one place, contact center software offers the following key benefits:

Unified solution

Because cloud-based contact center software allows agents to manage everything in one place, it provides seamless communication and increased agent productivity. While there are other solutions you could opt for – such as on-premise contact centers – cloud-based contact center software is definitely the most straightforward and affordable method.

Improved customer experience

Having access to all communication channels means support agents can see the client’s history regardless of how they got in touch. This improves the customer experience tremendously, as clients can jump between their favorite communication channels without having to repeat their problem over and over again.

Intelligent contact routing

Contact center software allows you to set up advanced contact routing for all types of communication, which enables you to direct customers to the right department in a matter of minutes. You can set up skill-based routing, self-service solutions, VIP numbers, and more. All of this decreases the time customers spend on hold and the number of call transfers, resulting in a more efficient contact center.

Reporting and analytics

Finally, all contact center platforms come with dedicated dashboards to track KPIs. While some providers can be more comprehensive than others, all of them provide real-time analytics and periodical reporting. This not only allows you to make quick decisions on a daily basis but also come up with mid- and long-term strategies.