Your call center software solutions should help your customer service team maximize productivity and engagement, ultimately helping to reach business goals and do more. Here are five features to look for in a call center software solution that will help your move forward instead of holding you back.
1. Call Center Software Solutions That Ease the Administrative Burden on Workforce Management
Supervisors can’t always easily address staffing and adherence concerns. This is especially true for home-based teams. Remote workrequires workforce management (WFM) to rethink how they will address these issues without ‘line-of-site’ convenience. Technology must bridge the gap.
Intelligent call center software can help ease some of these workforce management challenges by processing data from all your core contact center systems, and intelligently taking action in real time. For example, monitoring of employee statuses, including: After call work (ACW) or time spent in call wrap, AUX states, talk time, hold time, and much more. The inability to capture and react to all this information – on the fly – is costing you in lost time, opportunity, and dollars.
With the right software tool, call center supervisors can warn agents of nearing breaks or let an employee know they’re in the wrong call status. These types of situations can often require a supervisor or other senior agent to take the time out to alert someone.
In situations where a business requires dynamic shift and staffing requirements, software automation can also work to reallocate time among agents. These features can become especially important if you have agents in different locations or agents working from home.
2. Call Center Software Solutions That Handle Advanced Reporting
Metrics and KPIs aren’t just a way to see how you’re doing, they’re a way to see how you can do better. There’s a difference between tracking metrics and measuring the impact of them.
Good call center software solutions don’t just give you the numbers, they also give you the impact of those numbers. Trends can only tell you so much, but impact reporting can tell you what those trends really mean for your business.
Call center software should also help you figure out just how well the software itself is working for your business. For example, after implementation, the software should show you how it’s helping you by way of business reporting through monetary impacts.
3. Call Center Software That Increase Employee Engagement and Communication
Idle employees represent a perfect opportunity for engagement and communication. Good call center software can help facilitate these things and it can typically do so through automation.
For example, idle time can automatically trigger a reminder to go through emails, sign the new employee handbook documentation, or catch up on the updated procedures. If your call center software or bundled CRM tools aren’t also helping you to effectively communicate and engage your employees, then you may want to consider adding automated call center software to your system.
4. Automate Typical Call Handling Issues
What happens when one of your agents has a customer on hold for too long? What about when an agent sits in a state for longer than what’s reasonable? Often, these types of issues can indicate a problem that requires a supervisor or some other form of additional help.
The agent may need to go through a procedure just to alert the proper authority on the issue or to ask a question. All these things can create unnecessary time sinks and lower efficiency. Call center software that automates the handling of these types of call issues can help save time and, more importantly, increase customer satisfaction.
An example of this is an automated ping to a supervisor when hold time exceeds a certain threshold. Another example includes having a timely notification show up that asks an agent if they need help, which can curtail the need for the agent to spend time trying to find that help themselves.
5. Integrate Seamlessly with Your Other Systems
Call center software should never take away from efficiency. If the software can’t integrate seamlessly with your CRM or ACD system, then you will find you’re getting less out of the software than you’re paying for.
Consider that most software must work with what you have. In the end, you should look for a call center software solution that solves problems. Call center workforce management software should work for you and your business, not against it.