Essential Features for a Call Center Software
Call Recording
According to a research by Gartner Group, on average 68% of customers' first contact with any company is still via phone, and contact centers that record calls can extract a wealth of information from these interactions - whether the focus is on improving customer services, legal compliance or increasing revenue.
With increasing requirements to comply with corporate governance policies and improving customer services, contact centers have realized the need of recording, analyzing and archiving customer interactions and extracting insightful information from this data. Call recordings enable contact centers to leverage these interactions as a source of business intelligence for customer analysis, dispute resolution and legal compliance. There are a number of benefits that contact centers can get out of a call recording system such as:
- Availability of recorded data for dispute resolution and protection against fines and legal costs
- Compliance with service level agreements, organizational policies and industry standards
- Better customer service practices and performance measurement
Call Center Analytics
Performance and productivity of contact centers are based on a number of variable and real-time dynamics. Traditional reports and charts do not capture this dynamic information effectively to provide sufficient information and drill-down capability for managers to quickly identify issue, measure performance and take informed decisions.
Today, Contact center managers require interactive tools for processing and analyzing data. They need dashboards, information portals and dynamic visualizations that they use to view quick overviews, drill-down information, compare data, and manipulate information. Some of the instant benefits that contact center can gain from a dashboard application include:
- Quick oversight of business dynamics for effective decision making
- Accurate, relevant and accessible information
- Identification and monitoring of trends, KPIs, and performance impacting issues
Workforce Management
Contact centers thrive on two major performance factors: ability to reduce operational costs, and potential for generating revenue. Both of these aspects are directly impacted by a single and the most critical factor - the agents. Agents are not only the most expensive resource but also the most difficult to manage. Traditional methods of managing workforce require contact center administrators to continuously update and adjust daily schedules according to a number of parameters such as agent's availability, changing service level objectives, skipping production targets, and variable performance of agents.
A workforce management module integrated with contact center solution provides total visibility of contact center activities in real time and helps contact center administrators with four critical management operations:
- Analyzing call patterns and historical trends in order to forecast call volume and resource requirements
- Creating flexible schedules that can be adjusted in real-time according to the variance between actual and forecasted requirements
- Assigning tasks/schedules to agents and monitoring adherence to these schedules
- Generating real time reports, and tracking ongoing changes in schedules and labor utilization in order to take appropriate decisions
Script & Call Flow Designer
Contact centers serve a number of diverse industries ranging from debt collection to telemarketing and from banking to technical support. For each industry, the process of collecting, organizing and disseminating information varies; the challenge is to tap individual requirements of each campaign and design a customized presentation of script to the agents.
A well-designed script not only enables agents to collect, organize and retrieve information from the CRM but also ensures that data is entered and stored correctly in the database. Sophisticated script & call flow designers improve overall productivity and efficiency of agents by:
- Collecting, organizing and retrieving correct information from the CRM
- Validating data and ensuring that the data is stored correctly in the database
- Managing the call flow by triggering ‘if-else', where', ‘and-or' conditions to logically branch out script to the right places
- Facilitating individual script settings for each campaign and allowing real time changes in the scripts
Compliance Management
Contact Centers, these days, are under constant pressure to provide superior customer service as well as comply with a number of regulatory laws. Where failure to provide satisfactory services can cause poor customer loyalty, non-compliance may lead to litigation and loss of business.
Therefore, investing in a contact center solution that provides necessary tools for ensuring compliance with regulatory laws and industry standards is a smart decision; it helps you avoid costly mistakes.
Depending on the nature of business, contact centers must comply with a number of regional or global compliance requirements such as Do Not Call (DNC), FTC, PCI Security Standards, HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley etc. Most organizations, now, do not consider business with vendor/contractors and contact centers that do not meet necessary compliance requirements.
In future, the only way to retain and grow business would be to ensure reasonable checks in place to manage compliance and eliminate breaches. There are certain contact center solutions that provide tools for collecting, storing and transmitting data safely, managing DNC lists, and automatically adjusting dial settings to comply with TSR rules.
