It’s 2023 and the call center industry is booming. Thanks to new trends in omnichannel software solutions, the outlook for the whole sector is quite positive over the next several years. While this is a great benefit for companies looking to find an excellent and full-featured software solution to help them do business, it makes an already competitive field even harder to choose the best package for your needs.
Finding a good call center software solution can be critical to ensuring that your customer service remains top-notch in a global market where customers can pick and choose from a variety of retailers and businesses. If you’re working to evaluate whether or not a call center software solution will fit your needs, here are several factors to consider.
One of the biggest things to keep in mind with any call center software is whether or not it integrates with existing systems your company uses. For example, it is a good idea to have customer data linked from a CRM to your call center software so that agents have quick access to customer records when fielding calls.
With integrations with CRM systems like Salesforce, having newer Salesforce call center software can fully and dynamically integrate with a customer’s previous call history and alert agents to high-value customers who need even more attention than someone who may be calling you for the first time. This results in happier customers and greater profits for your business. It’s definitely a good idea to keep this feature on your list of must-haves when searching for a new call center platform.
Having an integrated software approach can also help new agents feel empowered at their jobs and improve retention. One way to do this is by implementing pop-ups so that an agent knows to ask a specific question during certain transactions. In the world of live performance, for example, this could be a dialogue that reminds agents to encourage someone to subscribe to a full season when purchasing multiple tickets at the regular price to your venue.
The resulting interaction helps improve customer satisfaction by saving the customer money and gives your business a dedicated subscriber in the process. Especially during peak call windows, these subtle upsells and nuances may be easy to forget, but are much easier to remember with pop-up reminders. Having knowledge bases easily accessible for newer agents is also a great way to ensure that they are always able to provide consistent service to your customers.
In an omnichannel call center approach, all of these tools are a few clicks or keystrokes away from being accessed, meaning that your agents won’t need to spend time fumbling from system to system to find them while wasting customers’ time. This helps you know that best practices are always being implemented on your team.
When you are working to find any new software solution or tool for your business, it’s always a good idea to draft an RFP, or request for proposals. Even if you don’t end up submitting it to the vendors you’re interested in learning more about, creating a document like an RFP ensures that you and your team have clearly listed the features that matter to you so that you can prioritize them in your search.
Integration with existing databases and software, pop-ups and tools that foster productivity, and omnichannel solutions are all cutting-edge features that you may want to include, but the above list of software capabilities is by no means exhaustive. It’s always a good idea to discuss each department’s needs individually when creating a document like an RFP so that you know that you are ensuring that each team member’s ideas are being prioritized in the process.
In turn, this can help you future-proof your business since you know that one department isn’t going to suddenly request a feature that you didn’t know was important to their job function. Ultimately, getting everyone’s opinions as a stakeholder in the RFP process is paramount in a crowded field of options for call center software.
