A Call Center Software is generally an end-to-end software solution for customer support, service and satisfaction. Such software are used by enterprises and companies to provide quality assistance to their customers. It also helps automate the entire call center process, in turn improving speed, quality, performance and productivity.

Call Centers are broadly classified as Inbound and Outbound. Inbound Call Centers receive calls and support tickets from customers and are focused on servicing. Outbound Call Centers make calls to potential and existing customers and are focused on marketing and sales.

Both, Inbound and Outbound Call Centers require software solutions that would provide most of the following functionality:

  1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – plays a vital role and should be well integrated with any Call Center software package.
  2. Multi-channel Communication – Communication should be allowed via multiple channels, that is via email, telephone, VOIP, chat, etc.
  3. Help Desk Management – Help desk should be available 24 x 7 to cater to all customer requests and direct them to appropriate departments.
  4. Telemarketing
  5. Call Accounting
  6. Automated Call Scheduling and Queuing – Incoming calls should be well queued and distributed evenly to free agents. The queuing and routing algorithm plays an important role.
  7. Call Recording and Monitoring – For marketing and sales, all agents should be able to manage outgoing calls and after-call followups.
  8. Workflow and Escalation Management – Request that cannot be handled by an agent should automatically be escalated to a respective senior personnel or department.
  9. Predictive Dialing
  10. VOIP Connectivity – VOIP being the cheapest and widely used communication channel, it has to be tightly integrated with every Call Center software.
  11. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) – The software should be able to reply to any customer with automated voice response.
  12. Voice Mail and PBX Integration
  13. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
  14. Call Conferencing
  15. Text-to-Speech Transformation
  16. Real-Time Reporting and Analytics – Reporting and analytic should be tightly integrated to study the traffic, quality, and response time of the agents.
  17. CRM Integration
  18. Agent Training Management – A total knowledge management and training module should be available to educate new agents and dig required information on customer’s request.
  19. Wikis and Knowledge Management
  20. Customer Segmentation and Prioritization
  21. Backup on Failure Capability – The Call Center software should be efficient enough to automate backup and recovery at regular intervals.
  22. Enterprise-class Scalability – The solution should be scalable enough to cater to any domain/business of any size.

Call Center Software in the Market

Many Call Center software packages are available in the market with different features and pricing. Few of the more renowned packages are:

  • Call Center Management by SalesForce [link]
  • Contact Center Software by Convergys [link]
  • Customer Interaction Management by Drishti-Soft [link]
  • Contact Center Communication Solution by SAP [link]
  • Call Center Software by Cisco [link]

Books on Call Center Software

A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology shows you:

Phone calls and emails from customers are not just “events”; they are significant milestones in customer relationships. A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology presents a roadmap showing you how to significantly improve customer relationships – whether via phone, mail, fax, email, or Web – by making the best use of call center technology. You will discover how to navigate the business, technical, and financial issues in building and managing a customer contact center. The book shows you how to foster enhanced customer satisfaction at a reasonable cost, and how to make the call center an engine of business growth by using technology to up-sell and generate new revenues from existing customers. No other book provides such practical, in-depth information on managing a call center’s technology and workflow. Key topics include staffing, network basics, ACDs; disaster recovery, data gathering and reporting, customer experience mapping and management, CRM, and much more.