7 Must-Have Contact Center Software Features

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When setting up a contact center you have to take many aspects into account and efficient software is one of the most important. There is a wide range of call & contact center solutions so it may be quite difficult to choose the most suitable. Let us outline the software features that are a must-have for your contact center.

1. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

It is one of the most essential components of inbound call center software. ACD system routes incoming calls to the most appropriate agents based both on customer and agent information. This intelligent routing personalizes customer service and increases customer satisfaction. Moreover, our Automatic Call Distribution software creates a universal queue for all channels (calls, web chat, email) thus ensuring that all requests will be handled as quickly as possible. What you need to do is to set processing priorities for each channel. 

2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

This must-have feature is in second place after ACD. It allows the caller to select the direction of routing using some voice prompts (“push one for this”, “push two for that”). A well-thought Interactive Voice Response system can give several benefits to your contact center. Firstly, it increases the level of self-service because customers will be able to get answers to simple queries (for instance, account balance or delivery status) without involving your agents. Secondly, it boosts your agents’ productivity as they will handle only the most difficult or non-typical tasks. Thirdly, IVR can be successfully used for agentless campaigns. You can use it both for cold calling and for informing existing customers, as well as to conduct some surveys. In this case, the callee listens to some preset voice messages and the IVR menu and pushes the button to indicate their interest or lack of it. Interested contacts can be connected with your agents immediately. Such campaigns may significantly increase your sales conversion. However, you have to check if robocalls are permitted by the law of the country where you are going to call.

3. Virtual Phone Numbers

Potential customers are less likely to answer calls from completely unfamiliar numbers, especially if you call from abroad. Fortunately, you don’t have to set up the office in the country where you call. With the Voiptime Cloud Contact Center platform, you can purchase DID numbers from more than 100+ countries. These are virtual phone numbers that will enable you to contact leads from their local caller IDs at cheaper call rates.

4. Real-Time Dashboards

Real-time monitoring allows you to track all essential metrics for contact centers like service level, average wait time, longest wait time, average handle time, number of available agents, etc. With real-time dashboards, your managers will be able to make more informed decisions to improve your contact center’s efficiency. Our call center software can provide you with different types of historical reports that will give you a whole picture of the working process. You will be able to evaluate agent productivity and workload, analyze campaign performance, see completed call scripts, and more.

5. Call Monitoring

It is impossible to imagine an effective contact center without such a must-have feature as call monitoring. It enables you to maintain your customer service at a high level. Call monitoring software allows joining live calls in three different modes (call barging, hidden mode, call whispering). It is also possible to use recorded calls for training purposes, selecting successful and unsuccessful examples. With live call monitoring, your supervisors watch how newbies deal with customers and help them in difficult situations, thus improving customer experience and providing more seamless agents’ onboarding.

6. Web Chat

This feature makes interaction with customers quicker and allows you to cut down on operation costs. One agent can handle several web chats at the same time and answer customers’ questions more quickly than by phone. If you add a chatbot, your customer service can become even better. It will handle simple and repetitive queries, routing more difficult tasks to your agents, and freeing them up to handle more challenging tasks. 

7. Predictive Dialer

If your contact center handles a large volume of outbound calls (for instance, sales or telemarketing campaigns), consider using a predictive dialer. It is an automated dialing system for outbound calls that dials multiple numbers from a list simultaneously. Predictive dialer calculates the required dialing speed based on multiple statistical data. One of the main benefits is that it evaluates the agent’s availability and dials the next number when a call is about to finish. Busy signals, disconnected numbers, no-answers, and voicemails are skipped over, so your agents talk only with real people. Predictive dialing provides your contact center with a steady flow of calls and reduces agents’ downtime. We recommend using it with big teams (5+ agents). In this case, dialing will be the most efficient. 

These are must-have contact center software features that can significantly increase its operational efficiency and help it excel. Choose the right vendor and succeed!

Tanya Gonchar

Expert in call center process automation, Head of Marketing at Voiptime Cloud. Interested in customer service, B2B sales, marketing, business analysis.

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