How to Choose a Call Center Solution for Your Business

How to Choose a Call Center Solution for Your Business

Phone-based support remains the most popular of all customer support channels businesses use. It’s a direct, one-on-one conversation between the business and the customer, which helps increase engagement. This means call centers are also an important section of the customer support department.

Since many solutions have flooded the market, businesses must carefully examine each and select a solution that fits their needs and customer demands.

Here is a brief guide to selecting a call center solution that fits your business profile.

What Is a Call Center?

A business call center is a centralized phone-based customer support department that handles outbound and inbound calls for customers, prospects, and leads. While it used to be decentralized within an organization, where call agents had room for handling the calls, this is not the case today.

Due to the increasing remote working palms, call centers can now be located within the business or outsourced to an agency such as CMS. Remote centers are often supported by software that improves their efficiency.

They are an important department because they make the business available 24/7 to address customer issues and support needs. They’re also the only opportunity for businesses to have a personal engagement and connection with customers.

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Call Center vs. Contact Center

People often confuse call centers with contact centers, but they have a difference. Call centers are focused on one communication channel: telephone handling. On the other hand, in addition to phones, contact centers also give support on additional channels, such as

  • Live chats
  • Email
  • SMS applications
  • websites
  • Social media

A business’ choice of a call or contact center depends on services or products, channels of communication, and structures of its support teams. A contact center can also be called a customer support center because they handle omnichannel inbound or outbound business communications. A call center can be part of a contact center, and the right call solution can empower sales and support the efficiency of customer service teams.

Types of Call Centers

The types of businesses that use call centers include:

  • Help desks
  • Online merchants/retailers
  • Telemarketing companies
  • Mail-order organizations
  • And more!

The three key types of call centers are:

  • Inbound: These centers typically receive customer calls for customer support, advice, complaints, and resolution of needs. The agents in these centers then screen them, forward or/and log the calls. They’re perhaps the most common centers.  
  • Outbound: These centers are typically focused on making phone calls to customers, leads, and prospects. This can be for different tasks such as telemarketing, lead generation, sales, scheduling appointments, promotions, customer surveys, and welcoming new clients. These centers are common in all types of businesses.
  • Blended: In blended call center handles, agents handle both outbound and inbound calls for the business. These are mostly found in agencies or cloud contact centers. Being cloud/virtual, blended call (contact) centers can operate from anywhere and are based on software solutions.

How to Choose a Call Center Solution

A call center solution (software) helps to automate the flow of outbound (outgoing) and inbound (incoming) calls of the business. It can also track and store caller (receiver) data for analysis. They allow businesses to improve their customer support and sales efficiency.

There are different call center solutions for different industries and company levels (startups, SMBs, and established ones). The best software depends on your business-specific needs. Besides identifying the type of center your business should have for a competitive edge, here are vital factors to consider when choosing one:

Customization

Different call center solutions provide different functionality features, but these features are general for the industry and business level the solution is designed to support. A good solution should offer easy customization to fit the specific needs of your business.

For example, while many solutions offer automation, how this fits your business schedule is more important. Whether you choose a comprehensive system or a simple one, the benefits you get depend on the requirements of your business and how the solution can be customized to fit.

Integration With Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Every call center software is designed for general industry applications, but each business uses different marketing technology to communicate and engage with its customers. A good solution should offer easy integration with other tools such as CRM, web applications, and shopping carts. This will allow easy connection and automation in engaging with customers, reports, and analysis.

Voice Communication Features

When customers give you a call, they need to find the right person quickly to address their needs. A key feature of a call center solution is how incoming calls are routed. If possible, consider a solution that has automated routing. The solution should also allow customers to listen to different options and select a preferred department. Other key voice communication features you should look out for are:

  • Call forwarding
  • Validating callers
  • Call transfers
  • Click to call
  • Interactive voice response (IVR)
  • Call tracking
  • Software Integration
  • Call scripting

Support for Outgoing Call

Call center software shouldn’t be only for inbound calls and customer interactions. As a business, you may also need to make outbound calls for lead generation, sales prospecting, upselling, or proactive customer support. Choose a solution that allows your sales, marketing team, or agents to make those outbound calls for proactive customer support options. In this case, some features to look out for are automated dialer software and call logging.

Web Tools and Cloud-Based Calling

As global technology improves, cloud solutions become more prominent. Call centers have not been left behind in the advancement, and cloud centers are becoming popular. They use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) features to fulfill their customer support needs.

VoIP centers run entirely through the internet rather than a phone line making them cheaper to install and maintain than standard landlines. You won’t require on-premise call hardware to set up a call center, just a computer, internet, and headphones. Most call center agencies have VoIP solutions as their main service provision options.

Call Center Solution Metrics

A call center’s metrics will help you understand whether the solution is right for your business. Some of the metrics to look out for are:

  • Average answer speed
  • Average call length
  • Transfer rate

These metrics tell how quickly and efficiently you will answer your customers and engage with them one-to-one. For example, a good solution should provide quick answer speed, considerable call length, and a speedy transfer rate.

Workforce Optimization

A Call center software should offer a wide range of workforce optimization features to enable managers, team leaders, and agents to track and analyze performance. Data and analysis can help increase agent efficiency and improve call center management. Some optimization features you should look out for are:

  • Call recording
  • Inbound call routing
  • Real-time call monitoring
  • Predictive dialing
  • Call analytics
  • Conversation quality monitoring
  • Real-time Reporting

Having the right solution with the right features will improve your agents’ work and support data analysis to improve customer service and support for a better customer experience.

Endnote

In today’s digital retail and competitiveness, customer support is more critical. Every business must express an urgent need to make the customer feel like they’re the business’s priority. While there are many ways to engage and support customers, telephone conversations are still the only real connection between the business and the customer hence the need for call centers. Since customer service isn’t only about listening and responding, call center solutions should help create memorable customer experiences.