Managing big teams of customer support agents isn’t easy, especially if they’re fielding hundreds of calls each day. But innovations like call center software can help keep your business running smoothly, even when you’re handling high call volumes.

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With so many software options on the market, it can be hard to know which is the right fit for your company. In this article, we’ll go over some of the main call center software features, so that you know what to look for on your software search.

Article Roadmap

• What Is Call Center Software?
• Key Features and Requirements
  • Calling Capabilities
  • Call Routing System
  • Collaboration
  • Dialers
  • Mobile Capabilities
  • Phone System
  • Voice Intelligence and Analytics
  • Voicemail and Messaging
  • Workforce Management
  • Platform Capabilities
• Conclusion

What Is Call Center Software?

Call center software is a program that helps call centers manage day to day operations. It allows agents to make and receive calls and manage multiple communications channels. By collecting all necessary information on one user-friendly, consolidated interface, call center software helps teams work faster, collaborate better and stay organized.

For any business offering customer support, call centers are indispensable. But a mismanaged call center can have negative effects on a business, especially in the way of dissatisfied customers.

Call center software features, like automatic call routing and dialer tools, keep help desk teams from drowning in high volumes of calls, and make handling both inbound and outbound calls more efficient.

According to McKinsey, giving your agents the right tools may be the secret to creating the superhuman agent, a combination of both human competence and technological innovation. Call center software can help you keep pace with industry changes and serve your customers better.

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Key Features and Requirements

It’s important to consider your industry, the market or customer demographic you cater to, the size of your organization, your budget and your goals when searching for a platform.

Businesses across many industries, however, can benefit from the most common call center software features. Let’s go over some of these features and call center software requirements and how they could help your business.

1. Calling Capabilities

According to Salesforce, phone calls are the most popular channel preferred by customers for seeking support. Call center software ensures you offer customers superior phone support quality.

Advanced features like calling merging, flipping and transfers help agents work collaboratively, while features like barge or call takeover allow supervisors to step in and take over a call when needed.

2. Call Routing System

Handling a massive volume of calls makes it easy for calls to get dropped or customers to be lost in the shuffle. Automatic call routing helps you avoid this problem by automatically routing each call your call center receives to an available agent.

You can also set up your routing to distribute calls to agents based on criteria like expertise and call type. For example, a customer calling for information on billing would be routed to an agent who handles billing queries.

Personal routing builds upon this, directing calls from a particular contact to the same agent each time for a more personalized experience. A recent survey by Zendesk found that 90% of consumers feel more loyal to companies that offer personalized customer service. This illustrates how important it is to invest in your customer relationships.

• List Dialing Mode
• Power Dialer
• Predictive Dialer
• Preview Dialer
• Progressive Dialer
• Redial
• Speed Dial
• Timezone Rules Dialing

3. Collaboration

Collaboration not only improves workplace productivity, but also can be crucial in providing the best possible customer experience. Allowing your teams to easily communicate and work together means that individual agents are less likely to run into queries they can’t resolve.

Audio conferencing enables multiple agents or departments to work collaboratively, both in internal calls as well as on live calls with customers. Screen recording and screen sharing aid collaboration, quality monitoring and review.

• Audio Conferencing
• Chat
• Conference Bridge
• File Sharing
• HD Video
• Screen Recording
• Screen Sharing

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4. Dialers

Though inbound calls are important, call centers aren’t limited to receiving calls. At times, your agents will have to make calls too, whether they’re following up with a customer or attempting to convert leads.

Automated dialers, like power dialers, preview dialers and predictive dialers, are especially helpful for marketing campaigns. As the name suggests, they automatically dial the next number on a contact list once a call is finished. This saves your agents time they would have spent manually dialing, allowing them to run through their contact lists faster.

• List Dialing Mode
• Power Dialer
• Predictive Dialer
• Preview Dialer
• Progressive Dialer
• Redial
• Speed Dial
• Timezone Rules Dialing

5. Mobile Capabilities

A call center software with mobile capabilities allows your agents to work from anywhere, even when they’re away from their main work devices. The system routes calls to verified mobile devices using VoIP technology. Additionally, a consolidated dashboard is accessible through Android and iOS apps.

Text messaging and mobile chat functions are also useful and assist with customer outreach and internal collaboration.

• Make and Receive VoIP Calls
• Mobile Chat
• Mobile Video Call
• Native Mobile Application
• Send Text Messages

6. Phone System

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, over 2 million agents are employed in customer service across the world. Human agents are the backbone of any call center operation and it’s crucial to make sure your call center agents have all the tools they need to do their jobs easily and effectively.

Agent desktops can provide a cohesive workspace from which agents can oversee and manage their tasks, access customer profiles and collaborate with each other as needed.

You can build on dashboard resources with agent scripting, providing your staff with guides to handle interactions with customers and ways to maneuver the conversation based on a customer’s answer. The more you’re able to reduce guesswork, the better your customer service outcomes will be.

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7. Voice Intelligence and Analytics

AI-driven analytics can help you gain more insight than ever before into the support experiences you provide. Dynamic, customizable wallboards track and display real-time data and metrics, including on call durations, wait times and service levels. Having these clear KPIs helps you identify areas of improvement and strategize better going forward.

Voice intelligence is another suite of AI tools that can help you serve your customers better. It analyzes customer calls for sentiment, pulling words or tones of voice that indicate positive or negative emotions. This adds an extra layer of insight for agents to use in their approach to each customer.

• Call Notes to Highlight Important Points
• Call Sentiment Analysis
• Call Summary
• Call Transcription
• Custom Reports
• Pre-built Reports
• Scheduled Reports
• Wallboard

8. Voicemail and Messaging

At times, issues may arise for your customers outside of your business hours, or when your agents aren’t available. Voicemail and SMS messaging allow customers to contact you the moment they need to, and make sure that agents can easily respond once they’re back online. Speech recognition and voicemail transcription ensure that messages are received clearly no matter the quality of your customer’s call.

IVR systems can build on this by routing customers to the appropriate agent’s inbox, or even answering simple queries with canned responses when possible.

• Business SMS and MMS
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System
• Message Waiting Indicator (MWI)
• Voicemail System
• Voicemail to Email Notification
• Voicemail to SMS Notification
• Voicemail Transcription

9. Workforce Management

Any operation with a lot of employees in a fast-paced environment benefits from effective workforce management. Call center software helps you manage daily workflows in many aspects.

Campaign and list management tools track marketing campaigns, measuring their success with detailed analytics. Performance management tools help you assess the quality of service your agents provide.

Workforce forecasting and scheduling uses data collected by the platform to help you predict call volumes and schedule agents accordingly. These tools make it easier to manage high call volumes while also avoiding being overstaffed during slow hours.

• Campaign and List Management
• Employee Performance Management
• Gamification
• Quality Management
• What-if Scenarios
• Workforce Forecasting and Scheduling

10. Platform Capabilities

Though your call center software should be a comprehensive platform on its own, it should also have the ability to integrate with other common applications. It’s especially important for the software to be compatible with the other systems you’re currently using.

CRM integration can help you manage campaigns and tailor communications to customer preferences. API connectors that allow third-party plug-ins and extensions can expand your software’s functionality, adding features as you need them. Calendar support and Google Chrome extensions allow for better scheduling and browser integration.

Security is another important concern, especially as call centers tend to deal with sensitive information, like customer names and contact numbers. And customers agree — a recent report by Cisco found that 89% of consumers describe privacy as a major concern. Features like role-based access control and two-factor authentication help keep your company’s data and your customers’ information safe.

• API Extensibility
• Audit Trails
• Calendar Support
• Call Encryption
• Chrome Extension
• Contacts Import and Export
• CRM Integrations
• Role-based Access Control
• Two-factor Authentication

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Conclusion

The right call center software can streamline your call center operations, improving productivity and customer satisfaction. We hope this article helped clear up what features to look for when searching for call center software.

Ready to get started? Try our requirements template to take the next step in finding the right software for your business.

Did we miss anything? What are some of the requirements you take into consideration when selecting ticketing software? Let us know in the comments!