A Stepwise Guide to Call Center Software Development
Whenever a business questions the propriety of having a call center established for the sake of ongoing customer support, here’s a statistical game changer. As per eConsultancy, 61% of clients prefer the option of having a phone number they can call and have their issues dealt with. Why? Even though email and chat support services have become an integral part of companies’ omnichannel service offerings, call centers still prevail in swiftness and efficiency, especially when it comes to serving the elderly and people with literacy issues, visual impairments, or reading disabilities. It seems like there are more pros than cons to having your call center software, and today we are talking about a stepwise guide on how to have it developed for you quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
Counterargument Low Block
Before we actually make it to the guide on call center software development, there is a need to acknowledge that many “experts” claim that call centers are nothing else but a relic of the past. They tend to say that there’s a lot of things that call centers do wrong, and they might be right. Those opponents claim that there are four major factors that should prevent a business from getting a call center of their own. Let’s dismantle them from the onset.
- Expensive hardware
It seems like those folks have never heard of multitenant customizable SaaS platforms that let you get a call center of your own, while simply paying for the cloud hosting of your data. What is more, the Voice over the Internet (VOIP) protocol has rendered call center services accessible and reasonably priced a long time ago. - Technical teams
No, a call center does need an entire in-house IT department to keep it running. Everything you need is a dedicated team of outsourced developers that will design and develop it. Then, the automated solutions only require support. - Inefficiency
Somehow, people tend to think that operators still have to dial in the numbers manually and that their serving capability is too low to be considered a value for business. Do not forget that we live in the age of digitalization, where serving each customer takes an agent nothing more but a few mouse clicks. - Low Conversion Rates
There’s to understand that conversion rates can only be applied to an outbound call center. If we’re talking about an inbound call center, there are no conversion KPIs, as these call centers serve to preserve your customers and not gain new ones. - Define The Type
The very first choice you’ll have to make will boil down to choosing what you want from your call center. It might sound obvious, yet it is not so as there are various types of call centers: inbound and outbound call centers. The difference is crystal clear; an inbound call center is the one to choose if you want to support your existing customers; an outbound call center lets you get the new ones.
In simple words, an inbound call center is when the agents get calls from your existing customers or provide the information required to the people who might become your customers in the near future. An outbound call center agent reaches out to potential customers, thus performing a telemarketing operation. Basically, the two agents provide information, but the inbound call center representatives resolve customers’ issues, which is the biggest benefit a company can grant a client.
Choose Core Functionality
Once you’re all set with the type of call center you need (by the way, you can combine inbound and outbound call centers, but it is quite a rare occasion that a business needs one), you have to decide on its core functionality. Basically, there are eight major things to take into consideration if you want your call center to win you more customers.
- Profile Management
A good call center will have the tools to manage both agents and callers profiles. While working with callers profiles helps handling data about the established customers and the leads at hand in a more proactive manner, agent profiles make it easier for the clients to know what each agent can help them with. This is nothing but an improved user experience, which is immensely important for modern customers. - Call Management
One of most important features that you have to infuse your software with is call management, as it helps a business deal with call recordings, call routing, call queues, and reconnection. All those features are increasingly important for quality control, client profiling, client retention, and user friendliness, respectively. - Interactive Voice Responses
The IVR system can be considered a part of the call management functionality, yet, it is a crucial independent customer care unit that ensures client retention before and after the client is connected to the agent. Aumotead greetings, service prompts menus, etc. are all part of the IVR system. - Automatic Call Distribution
Every business wants to cater to the client’s needs as precisely as possible. The Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system is just about that, as it intelligently routes calls to the agents, based on their compatibility with the service required, client’s demographics, and linguistic preferences. - Agent Statuses
Remember, make it easier on your clients and let the supervisor see agent statuses. Thus, each call can be assigned a corresponding agent swiftly, which means less waiting time for the client. - CRM
If you want your call center to become a place where you gather data that brings business insights instead of unstructured terabytes of unnecessary information, make sure to integrate a CRM into it. Salesforce, Zendesk, Velocity, Oracle, and others – the very choice of the CRM will become a secondary question once you define what information you want your agents to have in front of them when talking with a client. The more the agent knows, the faster the service gets. - Voicemail
Just a quick note here: the voicemail feature lets clients leave voice messages to the call center representatives, having them call back as soon as there is a free agent. It is a feature that extends the call center’s user-friendliness index by a mile. - Analytics
Like any other department within a company, a call center must work with critical performance metrics. It lets eradicate what’s terrible, improve what’s good, and preserve what’s perfect. The insights into the call center team’s performance, including the daily number of calls, their duration, average waiting time, service satisfaction rates, etc., are crucial to keeping the call center’s performance rates stable and high.
Choose Core Functionality
There’s a plethora of things to consider when embarking upon call center software development. While one thing is known pretty much for sure – a business that wants to stay relevant needs it – the rest is up to you. One way or another, there are two major things to decide on. What are the features you want it to have (what are the tasks you want it to deal with? Who can be deemed a reliable software development partner to proceed with the development and then the support of your platform. The answer to the first question will bring the answer to the second. Then, you’re packed and all good to go on your journey towards having a call center of your own.
