Choosing the Right Call Center Management Software

For many companies, the role of the contact center in keeping clients happy is increasing and improving operational efficiency and performance are key goals. Call center management software solutions have become important in helping companies provide consistently great experiences for their contact center customers. Contact center management automation can help companies target a number of critical initiatives to overall performance. 

5 Key Target Areas for Call Center Management Software 

1. Increase Productivity & Efficiency – Get customers to the right agent quickly and equip agents with the tools they need to solve customer issues swiftly and accurately. Monitor interactions in real time to provide on-the-spot coaching and improve performance. 

2. Gain Greater Visibility of Activities – Easily access data to make strategic decisions that impact your contact center operations as well as marketing, sales and service delivery. 

3. Improve Employee Engagement – Considering that agent wages account for 60-70% of a contact center’s costs, keeping agents motivated and productive through improved training, motivation tools, schedule flexibility and work location options is becoming invaluable to a growing number of organizations. 

4. Reduce Costs – Self-service options and more efficient workflows can get customer issues solved in less time and with fewer agents required. 

5. Comply with Government & Industry Regulations – Meet complex regulatory compliance requirements, a critical operational component to reduce risk and avoid costly fines, while maintaining productivity levels. 

Determining Your Requirements 

Call center management software solutions can range from simple telephone systems to highly sophisticated solutions that manage your inbound and outbound customer communications over a wide variety of channels. Before you get down to the details of what functionality you need, you’ll want to decide which solution attributes are important “must haves” to your organization and which are “nice to haves.” 

• Unified Solution – Do you want a single-source solution that has all of the features and functions you need built in or do you want to combine “best of breed” modules from a number of suppliers? Each has its advantages. 
• Integration with Existing Systems – Providing a 360° view of your customers requires that your contact center solution integrate with other enterprise systems like CRM, BPM and ERP so that all teams have access to critical customer data. 
• Deployment Model –There are three common deployment models for a call center solution: on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid. Which one is right for you depends on your organization’s operational, functional and budgetary needs. 
• Scalability – As your company changes, so will your contact center, not only in number of agents, but in locations, channels, databases and functionality. Your solution should make it easy to scale up or down, whether seasonally or permanently. 
• Security – Your customers trust you with sensitive personal data and that should be taken very seriously. When customer data gets into the wrong hands, the consequences can be devastating and long-lasting for your customers and your business. Security protocols like advanced encryption, intrusion detection, firewalls and vulnerability management systems are critical to protect you and your customers. 
• Strategic Reporting – You should be able to extract actionable data from your solution, quickly and easily, helping you improve and optimize. Look for reporting that spans the gamut from agent performance to customer behavior and profiling for improved targeting and service approaches. 
• Reliability – Your customers expect you to be available when they need you. You should expect the same from your system. Look for providers that maximize uptime with 24/7/365 support, SLA guarantees, redundant solutions and strategies to help you mitigate service outages. 

Measure What Matters – 5 Questions to Ask: 

Even if you have all of the latest tools and features, if you aren’t measuring the performance of your contact center, you can’t manage your contact center. You’ll want a call management software that lets you assess customer satisfaction as well as contact center performance. While each contact center will have a unique set of KPIs, the following questions will help you start figuring out what is meaningful for you and your customers: 

1. What factors are important to your customer interactions? First call resolution, time on hold, minimal transfers, agent knowledge, etc. 

2. What factors are important to you? Factors like customer satisfaction, new customer acquisition, contact center financials, customer effort scores and agent attrition are just a starting point for measuring and monitoring. 

3. What factors are quantifiable? If you are going to measure performance over time and progress against goals, you’ll need to set benchmarks and have concrete data. 

4. What is actionable? With a sophisticated solution, you have access to lots of data. However, if that data does not help you make decisions, develop plans or improve processes, it’s probably not very useful. 

5. How frequently will you measure? If you look at data too often, you won’t give the new strategies you have put in place time to affect change. If you don’t look at data often enough, issues will go unchecked and unresolved.