Call Centre Software – a Myriad of Roles and Responsibilities

Modern day call centres strive for superior customer service with matching efficiency at competitive costs. When this mission is supported by an effective management and control framework, the contact centre is likely to forge ahead towards impressive growth rates and enjoy a loyal and growing clientele.

To achieve high quality services and enviable growth rates, call centres have to depend heavily on specialised software such as call centre management software, predictive diallers, softphone diallers, VoIP call control, etc.

But these software tools can be expensive and different kinds of software are intended to suit different kinds of processes and turnover magnitudes. So how do you decide which one would suit your operations best?

Deciding on the best call centre software solution

Start by analysing your current message/call turnover and other functions. This analysis will throw up the following facts:

· Number of service requests per day, and per month.

· Channels through which a particular request is being made. In other words, which are the major media for the service requests, whether they are coming via phone, Internet, email, SMS etc.

· What is the primary nature of calls? Whether they are for after-sales service or for telemarketing or whether they are inbound or outbound.

· Number of agents handling the calls and whether there are multiple locations involved.

· Are there any parameters to judge agents’ performance? If yes, what are they and how effective are they in accurately measuring the performance.

· The type of phone system being used and the suitability of the same for your type of operations

After you have analysed the different aspects of your call centre, match your requirements, budget and IT infrastructure with the features, benefits and cost of the call centre software products such as predictive diallers, softphone diallers, VoIP call controllers. This will enable you to buy the right one.

Once a particular software suite is purchased and implemented, the call centre management needs to understand how the software can help them in various tasks, especially in monitoring and assessment. Here is how it can be done:

How does the call centre software help the management tackle different issues?
Since call centre operations involve so many agents and so many different channels of customer-agent interaction, such as emails, web, voice calls etc., it is imperative that there is a high level of integration and monitoring.

Call centre software suites which come loaded with features such as, softphone diallers, VoIP call control, call centre monitoring software, call centre scheduling software etc. are of great help to the management to run its operations smoothly and maintain a high, yet discreet, level of monitoring and assessment. These technologies, in general, enable the call centre managers to do the following:

1. Manage various call centre tasks and functions better, as these software solutions give them a complete overview of the various processes.

2. Meet deadlines - call centre monitoring software affords the managers to schedule and assign various tasks as per the requirement and the recourses available.

3. Meet the performance criteria as chalked out in their SLA (service level agreement) - call centre monitoring software will give a clear picture of agents’ performance by providing key performance indicators.

4. With advanced call centre software, managers can analyse call distribution and trends as they relate to various demographics and even seasons. They are thus able to offer optimum solutions to the client.

5. Accurately forecast the future performance based on the past performance indicators as provided by call centre management software. This software even suggests ways to improve upon the past performance and helps implementing the solutions.