What Are The Key Technologies Of Call Centers?

Recent trends in call center technology, such as automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), make the daily flow of calls much more organized and easier to manage.

Leveraging contact center software capabilities is necessary to keep sales and support teams efficient and profitable, and to reduce common call center problems.

These tools have adapted and come up in various trends over the years and consequently VoIP providers have modified their own offerings to keep up.

What Is Call Center Technology?

Call center technology encompasses all the software tools that help agents and customer service departments run smoothly through automation, customer relationship management, customer behavior analytics, and other performance metrics. Its goals include a better customer experience (CX), lower operating costs, and increased productivity by providing more efficient communication and collaboration.

What Are The Key Technologies Of Call Centers?

1) Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) guides the caller through a self-service menu. Based on your answers, the system starts the process of routing calls to direct them to the correct department. This tool allows you to manage the contact center more efficiently.

Why Is IVR Important For Call Centers?

This software automates the customer service offering with the goal of helping callers resolve their queries. Otherwise, they are automatically redirected to an agent who can help them. Thus, the IVR not only offers a fast and efficient customer journey for clients, but also allows agents to spend more time dealing with complex queries.

2) Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is a feature that routes incoming calls to the most appropriate agent or department to handle the query.

The ideal call path is chosen based on predetermined criteria and routing options such as skill-based, time, and customer type.

Why Is ACD Important For Call Centers?

ACD avoids one of the biggest customer complaints: having to repeat the same problems to every agent they’re transferred to if the first person they spoke to didn’t have the skills or information to help them. Instead, each customer is routed to the best available agent, often eliminating the need for a follow-up call.

According to Hubspot, 40% of customers want agents to respond to their queries faster, and more than 60% of them expect an employee to be able to address their specific needs. The ACD makes it possible.

3) Call Recording

This is a standard call center feature that records phone calls (or video calls) automatically or on demand. These recordings can be used for employee training, quality control, or to clarify communication issues.

Why Is Call Recording Important For Call Centers?

69% of businesses routinely record calls to monitor agent performance and overall customer satisfaction rates.

Call recording data provides insight into common customer service requests, complaints, and even what customers want a company to offer in the future.

Many call recording features allow supervisors to listen to calls in real time. In this way, they can give advice to the agent during the conversation, but without the customer being able to hear them. In addition, the call intrusion function allows a manager or superior to take over a complex call when necessary.

4) Reports And Analytics

Reports and analytics offer the unique opportunity to monitor KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) by collecting real-time and historical data.

Thus, call center metrics can be monitored: average call duration, abandon rate; first call resolution (FCR); daily agent call volume; CSAT (customer satisfaction survey); and customer retention rates, among others.

Why Are Analytics Important For Call Centers?

With reports and analytics, supervisors can see where a team, agent, or department has room for improvement. In this way, the information can be used to advise specific agents, implement new objectives and/or see if they are fulfilling the current ones.

5) Workforce Management (WFM)

Workforce Management (WFM) software helps increase agent productivity by managing scheduling, balancing workloads, forecasting future customer behaviors / trends, among others. It also helps simplify the onboarding process for new employees and speeds up data entry.

Why Is It Important For Call Centers?

Workflow management tools provide a bird’s-eye view of current staff activity, ongoing projects, and customer/agent behavior and trends from KPI analysis.

The WFM also helps manage scenarios such as a sudden increase in call volume.

6) Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)

Computer Telephony Integration refers to the technology that allows computers to interact with your phone system and other communication channels, such as text messaging, social media, and live chat.

Why Is CTI Important For Call Centers?

Contact centers receive a high volume of calls every day, and CTI provides instant access to past customer data such as order history, previous agent notes, and contact information, making conversations more efficient.

CTI also includes features such as call transfer or click-to-call, which improve agent productivity.

7) Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Conversational AI processes the words that are spoken and determines how to respond in the most natural way possible. This process begins when a customer submits a request over the phone or even online through social media.

The AI captures the meaning of the words submitted using natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding to understand the intent of that customer’s question.

Why Is Conversational AI Important For Call Centers?

According to Juniper Research, AI technology is expected to reduce business costs by more than $8 billion annually by 2022. 

Using these tools gives customers a more personalized experience and makes it easier to automate daily tasks. 

How To Enhance A Contact Center With The Right Technology?

By combining the latest trends in call center technology with essential features like call recording, call routing, and ACD, sales and support teams will be streamlined, productive, and equipped with the tools they need to improve the overall customer experience.