Call centers aren’t going anywhere in the digital age. Thanks to advances in cloud technology, they’re becoming more advanced than ever.
Call centers are the nerve center of your customer service efforts. Phone agents are the most effective solution to solving client issues. Without a call center, your clients are stuck with second-rate solutions, causing them to look elsewhere.
But call centers are a hassle to manage. Without the right platform, a poor feature set will leave your agents flailing. With so many call center platforms out there, it’s hard to decide which will meet your needs.
In this article, you’ll learn about the most essential call center phone system features your company needs.
What Makes a Successful Call Center?
A successful call center phone system features the latest technology to provide the best customer service. Powerful cloud-based platforms like Bright Pattern’s enable your call center to use cutting-edge technology on day one.
Cloud-based customer service centers offer a host of essential features we’ll describe below.
1. True Omnichannel
Many companies may have all the channels, but what customers expect is a seamless continuous conversation across channels. When a customer first chats with a company, then makes an inbound call into the company, the company should be able to know that and then respond. They can also acknowledge the previous interaction by saying, “Hello, I noticed you were last chatting with us about a new TV, is that why you are calling today?”. Omnichannel means the customer doesn’t have to repeat information and “start over” every time they choose a different channel to utilize when itneracting with a company. A true omnichannel solution unifies all channels and interactions into an easy, effortless journey not only for customers, but also for agents too!
2. Skill-Based Routing
Skill-based routing is a call-routing practice where automated systems assign customers to agents with the right skills to handle their problems. For instance, German-speaking customers go to German-speaking agents.
Without skill-based routing, incoming customer calls will go to unqualified agents. Agents will have no choice but to pass the customer along to another representative after realizing they can’t help. And whenever a customer has to wait for a new agent, they’ll become angrier—often to the extent of hanging up and switching companies.
But with call center software featuring skill-based routing, customers always go to the right place the first time.
3. Cloud-Based Call Center
Manually building a call center is expensive and time-consuming. Single pieces of hardware like telephony cards can cost upwards of $800 alone, never mind the work needed to fix inevitable problems.
Move your call center to the cloud instead of burning cash on heavy technical costs. Cloud-based call center capabilities like Bright Pattern’s let firms outsource all their technical customer support needs to a comprehensive platform. Cloud-based software means zero in-house headaches and all the latest call center phone system features. Cloud-based software also makes upgrades easy, since you don’t need technical expertise or personnel to make the updates. A simple download from the cloud storage will give you the updates you need to deliver modern CX to customers. Your contact center is future-proofed on a cloud-based platform.
Cloud-based software also means transitioning from a call center to an omnichannel contact center. With its wide range of channels and extensive third-party integration capabilities, cloud-based software provides the best customer support platform.
4. Agent Assist in the Desktop
Agent Assist within an unified agent desktop can help improve efficiency during interactions and improve the agent experience. Agent assist can come in many forms, including through the use of suggested responses to help with calls, chats, emails, messenger conversations, and so on. With best-of-breed AI integrations, AI can understand the text and analyze sentiment, and then formulate a response that the agent can easily put in to the chat.
Knowledge base articles can also be placed at the agent’s fingertips for assistance during customer interactions.
5. Power Dialers
Power dialers automate the process of adding phone numbers to an agent’s calling queue, so they don’t have to dial them one by one. Automating the dialing process eliminates tedious work and saves agents valuable time, making power dialing a call center software requirement.
You can dial phone numbers directly from your CRM with Bright Pattern. Additionally, CRM integration gives your agents context for each incoming call by displaying caller information on their screen.
Predictive Dialing
Bright Pattern’s predictive dialing takes power dialing a step further. Using AI, our auto dialer allows agents to eliminate the process of manually finding and dialing client numbers, increasing productivity and your bottom line.
6. Integrations for CRM
Call center integration with CRM allows agents to receive full context for every client. Bright Pattern, for instance, integrates with nine top CRM solutions to give representatives detailed info about existing contacts.
CRM integration enables easy access to customer information, including phone numbers, interaction history, and call recordings. As mentioned above, agents can also see customer information during incoming calls. This is crucial because the agent can personalize the interaction for the customer based on the customer’s status and needs. CRM integrations can also be utilized for skills-based routing to route specialized customers to the best agent for help.
7. Best-of-Breed AI
Best-of-breed AI integrations can help your call center improve efficiency and fill the gaps where human agents can’t. Regardless of how large your service team becomes, you can’t expect a human agent to always be available to customers. AI can power chatbots that help companies fill this gap by answering customer questions instantly. And when a customer needs human support, chatbots can send them to the right person.
AI can also be utilized to personalize the customer experience and deliver self-service. For example, in a conversational IVR, callers can utilize their natural language to give the AI information that will either help them resolve their issue or lead them to the right resource.
Finally, AI can be utilized to help with quality management in the contact center. AI, through the use of sentiment and text analytics, can determine sentiment of a customer during an interaction on any channel, whether it is voice, email, text messaging, web chat, messenger apps, and more. On Bright Pattern’s platform, for example, quality management can be done on all channels in an omnichannel format, making it easy for supervisors and call centers to monitor 100% of all interactions on all channels.
8. Cloud-Based Software
Manually building a call center is expensive and time-consuming. Single pieces of hardware like telephony cards can cost upwards of $800 alone, never mind the work needed to fix inevitable problems.
Move your call center to the cloud instead of burning cash on heavy technical costs. Cloud-based call center capabilities like Bright Pattern’s let firms outsource all their technical customer support needs to a comprehensive platform. Cloud-based software means zero in-house headaches and all the latest call center phone system features.
Cloud-based software also means transitioning from a call center to an omnichannel contact center. With its wide range of channels and extensive third-party integration capabilities, cloud-based software provides the best customer support platform.
Conclusion
Call centers need access to the latest tech to support their customers effectively.
The eight call center phone system features we featured give your agents an edge in handling customer complaints. Each feature contributes to a more efficient call center that always handles customer issues on time.
Remember, not all call center platforms exist equally. Many call centers lack not only the features described above but other call center capabilities crucial to customer satisfaction. But Bright Pattern’s call center software features cutting-edge technology designed to make your customer support the best in your industry.
