Date: August 21, 2024Want your agents to deliver a personalized customer experience and resolve customer queries quickly? Adopting proven call center tools and features that support agents usually rely on can make a significant difference.
After all, great customer service is known to improve revenue by a whopping 80%.
That’s why we have brought you this guide on the 10 best call center tools and features that the support or customer service agent uses to deliver the best service.
What are Call Center Tools?
Call center tools present in call center software enable agents to streamline and manage customer communication. These tools empower the customer service team with automations to increase operational efficiency and analytics to drive data-based decisions.
All the tools that call center tools software offer significantly lower infrastructure costs and improve productivity. Not just that, using these call center tools you can easily increase revenue and maintain regulatory compliance.
When choosing your call center software, start from the basics. Select features and tools that meet your needs and are proven to drive predefined results, like advanced analytics for accurate performance insights and an AI chatbot for quick query resolution.
Top 10 Call Center Tools & Features
Call center management tools (BPO tools) are critical to boosting agent productivity, reducing infrastructure costs, increasing revenue, and maintaining regulatory compliance. That’s possible only when your call center software solution has the required tools and features.
Here are 10 such call center tools (technology) you cannot miss having:
1. Interactive Voice Response System (IVR)
IVR is a call-routing system that gathers the callers’ query data to direct them to a relevant resource or human agent. It is utilized to deploy predefined responses to frequently asked questions, along with proper follow-up actions.
Support agents use IVR to prevent callers from waiting in queues to get a response by routing them correctly, improving the overall customer experience. Also, IVR helps agents handle increasing call volumes without burdening them. With IVR, agents are able to drive high customer satisfaction and a streamlined issue-resolution process.
2. Call Recording
Call center agents always use call recording tools to record and log business-related inbound customer calls. Typical call recording tool helps agents maintain consistent customer service across the call center. How? By referring to the recordings to resolve issues.
Also, agents can easily refer to the clear record of interactions to solve the newly assigned issue that a different agent previously handled. So, customer support doesn’t stop even when the assigned agents are unavailable.
With call recording data, your quality assurance managers and analysts can rule out each agent interaction’s details, like issue resolution times and quality of service.
3. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
ACD is a contact center software tool that accurately determines the inbound callers, arranges them in relevant, pre-defined queues, and finally directs them to appropriate agents automatically. This eliminates the need for callers to laboriously reach out to the department that can potentially solve their query.
you divert callers to relevant departments based on the caller’s information, support agents do not have to drain time attending to queries that don’t fall within their expertise. They can easily and efficiently invest time in providing callers with the best experience by resolving queries instantly.
: 13 Best Call Monitoring Software4. Auto Dialer
Auto dialers are one of the most popular tools used in call centers. This software tool utilizes artificial intelligence to determine the next phone number that the agent can dial to manage outgoing calls efficiently.
Using this tool, you can deliver critical information via automated messages or by connecting customers to agents after the call is answered.
In the process, you don’t have to involve support agents much, freeing them from dialing numbers manually and allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
5. Customer Relationship Management Software
74% of businesses believe that CRM provides them with better access to in-depth customer data. Call center agents often integrate CRM like HubSpot and Salesforce with call center software to pull and centralize customer data from each business tool.
This helps agents get a clear picture of customer conversations to further personalize the customer experience and reduce resolution times. Sometimes, agents don’t need to integrate CRM as it comes in-built with the call center software loaded with features.
CRM’s screen pop feature lets agents view the caller’s name, company, account value, customer experience score, and survey response on active calls. They can then use this data to provide appropriate support without customers having to explain their issues, improving customer satisfaction.
6. Help Desk
Help desk tools are systems used in call centers that enable support agents to streamline inbound customer queries from multiple channels like calls, live chat, and email in a single space. This way, agents can easily provide omnichannel customer support without any stress of managing multiple channels.
Not just that, a helpdesk tool also enables customers to reach out to businesses on their preferred channel.
In addition, help desks offer self-service options like a knowledge base or automated chatbot to empower customers to resolve their queries without involving an agent. This saves agent hours and boosts productivity.
7. Call Analytics
Support agents use call analytics software tool to monitor contact center operations, KPIs, and call center metrics. These metrics, combined with actionable reports, give insights into the quality and speed of customer service and the success of the call center goals. Some indispensable call analytics are –
- Query type to determine the most popular support tickets–product, billing, service cancellation. Customer service agents use it to check if they can develop a self-service option for some queries, lowering call volumes.
- Call volume to gauge the number of live calls agents have to cater at once and ensure there’re enough customer service agents to fulfill the demand.
- Average call time to gain insights about hours agents invest in a service call and modify it if it’s increasing queues and call times.
- Customer sentiment to gauge customer satisfaction and analyze sentiments after the service call with your agent.
: Call Center CRM – Complete Guide with Top Contact Center CRM Software8. Predictive Dialer
A predictive dialer software is an intelligent automated call center solution that starts making calls to a predefined contact list even before agents are available. Agents use predictive dialers to increase their outbound call volumes, which adds to improved efficiency.
It makes agents highly productive as the system automatically jumps to the next number when a call goes unanswered, and agents do not drain time listening to dialing tones.
Also, when a call is answered, this dialer routes it to the best available agent, improving productive talk time and call center productivity.
9. Call Queue
Customers expect the fastest possible response from support agents, and the call queues tool helps agents fulfill this expectation. How? By arranging inbound callers in a waiting line instead of directing them to voicemails.
This software helps agents reduce customer frustration while waiting in queues with an automated greeting informing them about the wait time. This way, callers can decide whether to wait or call back later based on their urgency.
It allows agents to set call flows, enabling customers to gain business-related knowledge or listen to music. This cuts down hold time and reduces the number of phone calls required to resolve an issue. This is how agents can ensure customer happiness even when they’re on other calls.
10. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Call centers aim to deliver a top-notch customer experience. Support agents can achieve this only when you make them aware of how satisfied customers are with the offered support. You can make them aware by letting agents capitalize on customer satisfaction surveys. This feature comes built-in with contact center solutions.
It sends an automated message to customers after their support call (inbound and outbound calls) asking them to score agents on friendliness, communication, and product knowledge. With the collected survey results, agents can gauge the quality of their support and fix improvement areas.
Choose a Call Center With the Tools and Features You Need
Your call center software will directly impact the quality and efficiency of your customer support. So, you must choose the best call center software with relevant tools and features that can efficiently fulfill your call center needs.
For example, experiencing high call volumes? Make sure your call center has IVR to cater to frequently asked questions or minor issues to reduce the number of calls your agents have to handle. Or want in-depth insights into agent performance? Your call center software must have a robust analytics tool.
CallHippo’s call center software has all the tools and features your agents require to work at the highest productivity and efficiency. With CallHippo, you can gain insights into caller data and past interactions so your agents can deliver a personalized experience. 77% of business leaders believe that personalized support improves customer retention.
What’s more, its predictive dialer capabilities allow your agents to make calls outside the contact list using the provided keypad. Lastly, CallHippo’s support is responsive, so your agents can resolve their queries timely.
: Call Center Software vs. PBX Solution | 12 Points To KnowWrapping Up
Now that you’re aware of the call center tools, and features, remember that your agents may not need all of them, depending upon your call center needs. So, choose accordingly.
Don’t chase the best or most feature-rich call center agent tools or call center solutions. The wiser choice is to select a call center software provider like CallHippo which has plans wherein you only pay for features you use.
Ready to elevate customer support quality? Start your free CallHippo trial today!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are contact center tools?
Contact center tools are technologies that enable you to handle customer communications effectively. They have the functionality to manage workflows, streamline customer interactions, improve customer service, and monitor agent performance.
2. Why are contact center tools important for customer-centric support?
Contact center tools are essential for customer-centric support because they provide data that you can use to personalize service and reduce response times for customers using automations.
3. Which CRM is best for a call center?
Some of the best industry-leading CRM or workforce management tools are Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho. CallHippo, a robust call center software solution, integrates with all three.
Supriya is a highly skilled content writer with over 8 years of experience in the SaaS domain. She believes in curating engaging, informative, and SEO-friendly content to simplify highly technical concepts. With an expansive portfolio of long-format blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, and case studies, Supriya is dedicated to staying in touch with emerging SaaS trends to produce relevant and reliable content.
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