Call center software provides tools and capabilities that help call centers to manage operations, increase efficiency, monitor quality, enhance agent performance, and continuously improve processes to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
What are contact center solutions vs. call center solutions?
A call center primarily handles customer communication via telephone, so most call center solutions revolve around routing, handling, recording, and analyzing phone calls. Because contact centers communicate with customers across all channels – telephone, email, chat, social, SMS text, web, mobile apps, and more – contact center solutions facilitate and analyze omnichannel interactions.
What are the different types of call center software?
Call centers rely on various software solutions to automate processes, increase efficiency, and monitor quality.
- Soft phone and mobile app software enables agents to receive calls on a variety of internet-connected devices, supporting promoted hybrid workforces.
- Interactive voice response (IVR) tools automatically collect details and choices from callers before connecting them with the most appropriate agent. IVR systems can determine which department a caller should be routed to, which language the customer prefers, and whether the caller’s question or issue can be resolved through self-service options.
- Automatic call distributors optimally route calls to minimize wait times and connect callers with the agent who can best help them.
- Call accounting software collects data on phone usage.
- Call monitoring software records and tracks the conversations between agents and customers to monitor QA metrics, track agent performance, and pinpoint areas for additional training or modifications to call scripts and processes.
- Predictive dialer tools automatically dial numbers to improve efficiency for outbound call centers.
- Help desk software delivers self-service options for customers.
- Customer relationship management (CRM) tools provide a centralized system for managing customer data, including personal info and demographics, purchase history, and previous contact with call center agents.
- Workforce management software enables managers to anticipate call volume, adjust staffing levels, and manage agent schedules.
- Call center analytics tools track and monitor various metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) around call center efficiency, agent performance, and customer experience.
What features are important in call center software?
To enable superior performance, call center software should:
- Facilitate omnichannel interactions. Even though call center agents primarily engage customers via the telephone, many customers expect to communicate with the company on other channels as well.
- Integrate seamlessly with the technology stack. Call center software must integrate with CRM technology, help desk tools, social networking software, and various other systems.
- Capture unsolicited feedback. Conversations between customers and call center agents often contain unsolicited comments that can be invaluable as companies seek to better understand customers’ needs, preferences, opinions, and behavior. With software that can mine these conversations for intelligence, call centers and businesses can enhance customer experiences, develop ideas for new products and services, and improve brand perception.
- Scale easily. In addition to managing dramatic spikes in call volume, contact center software should scale easily to accommodate rapid growth in call center operations.
- Offer cloud-based deployment. Cloud-based solutions enable call centers to deploy software quickly and to offload the responsibility for management and maintenance to a third-party provider.
- Support security and compliance objectives. Since many conversations with customers include sensitive, personal and financial information, call center software must protect interactions with encryption and ensure compliance with data privacy laws.
What are call center metrics?
Call center metrics are measurements by which call center managers track progress toward key performance indicators (KPIs) related to call center efficiency, agent performance, and customer experience. Call center metrics help managers improve specific processes and target agent behaviors for guidance or reinforcement. Important metrics include:
- Average handle time (AHT), the average time spent on a call by an agent, including talk time, hold time, and after-call work.
- First call resolution (FCR), the percentage of customer issues resolved on the initial call.
- Abandoned call rate, the percentage of customers who hang up before speaking with an agent.
- Average speed of answer (ASA), the average time a customer must wait before connecting with a live agent.
- Transfer rate, the percentage of calls referred to a different department, a more experienced agent, or a supervisor.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT), a measure of how satisfied customers are with their call center experience.
- Net promoter score (NPS), measuring the likelihood that customers will recommend the company or the call center to their social circle.
What is call center analytics?
Call center analytics is the practice of gathering and analyzing data, monitoring call center metrics, and tracking KPIs in an effort to improve call center operations, increase efficiency, enhance agent performance, and deliver a superior customer experience. Call center analytics involve tracking quantitative data about the length of wait times and the percentage of first call resolutions as well as qualitative data about the effectiveness of agents in resolving customer issues. Traditionally, call center analytics have relied on manual reviews of call recordings to gain deeper insight into customer needs and agent performance. However, this captures intelligence from a small fraction of the many interactions agents have with customers each day. Consequently, many call centers now use conversation intelligence technology that can automatically capture and analyze 100% of interactions with customers.
What tools do call centers need for omnichannel analytics?
To analyze every conversation with customers on every channel, call centers need omnichannel analytics solutions that combine speech analytics for telephone conversations and text analytics for communications via email, chat, SMS text, social media, web, and others.
How does conversation intelligence work?
Conversation intelligence technology uses AI and machine learning to capture and analyze unstructured information in voice and text-based interactions and combine it with sentiment and emotion analysis. Conversation intelligence solutions then convert this information into structured data that can be searched and analyzed to deliver insight into the customer’s needs and opinions and the drivers of their behavior. By capturing, analyzing, categorizing, and scoring 100% of customer interactions across all channels, conversation intelligence provides call centers with deeper insight and comprehensive visibility into the customer mindset, agent performance, and a wide range of call center metrics.
What is CallMiner Eureka call center software?
CallMiner Eureka is the global leader in conversation intelligence solutions for driving business performance improvement. As the most comprehensive platform for analyzing omnichannel customer interactions at scale, CallMiner provides a collection of call center software that enables managers to harness the power of conversation intelligence. In addition to capturing and analyzing every audio and text-based customer interaction, CallMiner provides tools to enhance coaching, alert agents and supervisors to customers at risk of churn, provide agents with next-best-action guidance, and enable managers to visually explore the data gleaned from customer interactions.
