Top 5 Must Have / Essential features to start a Call Center

We have been interacting with 1000's of SME's in the industry and quite often the customers are unaware of what features are a must have in a Call Center solution and also what each of it means. This article in our blog post tries to explain the Top 5 Must Have Features in a Call Center solution without which no technology/software can claim that they have a solution for your call center.

Top 5 Must Haves:

1. ACD (Automatic Call Distribution)/Queue Management: In Simple terms ACD  is a feature which ensures that any Inbound or Outbound call is connected to the Right Idle/Free Agent. It is a very important and basic feature which connects the customer Faster and also ensures that all agents get approximately equal amount of work distribution - Could be number of calls in a sales organization, could be talk time in a support organization. Queue Management allows you to manage your call flow into the contact center efficiently. Click Here for more. 
2. CTI ( Computer Telephony Integration): CTI connects the ACD to the client CMS/CRM. The primary function of a CTI is to give the screen pop of the caller information ( in case they are an existing customer) or give a Add customer page in case of a unidentified caller number. This saves the agent from wasting time looking up customer information and it acts as a major productivity tool for  the Call Center. Also, it ensures customer is not aggravated from repeating information to the agent since the POP shows this info.
3. Live Monitoring Systems/Dashboards: The primary/ basic setup in a contact center is there is a team which handles calls and there is a Team Lead/Supervisor who manages & monitors them. Live Monitoring is a basic feature which provides necessary tools to the contact center supervisor in monitoring agents status ( whether they are free, on a break or busy talking to a customer) and if necessary allows the supervisor to use Call Barge in Features like  Snoop the call - To listen to the call without being heard or do a Call Whisper - where you can tell the agent on what to talk or Barge In - where in you get into a conference with the agent and customer.
4. Dialers/API Integrations: Though the traditional view point is dialer is something which is used in a sales centric Call Center, modern day implementations include auto call backs to Unanswered calls, Auto dialer for converting leads coming from Aggregators like Just Dial etc. Though Dialers are a must, the system is still not so easy to integrate without API's or a strong IVR platform. Though traditional contact center players do provide integrations, Check if your Contact Center technology provider works with API's for IVR and Dialer Integrations ( We at http://cloudagent.in do provide these).
5. Audio recordings: This is the most sought after feature by almost all Contact Centers. They are a must in many Contact Centers where regulatory norms prescribe 100% recordings and storage of over an year. Based on your Organizational Information Retention Policies, You might need to store longer than this. However, almost 90% of contact centers use audio recordings for agent performance reviews than anything else.

Next time when someone approaches you and says they are providing a call center solution, do check if they provide these basic features. Though a good reporting structure is a good to have ( probably 6th most important feature), you can run ops with out reporting but not without the above 5 features. Hence , this is our choice of the Top 5 Must Haves in a Call Center.

About Us:

We at http://cloudagent.in provide our customers all these features to our customers. If interested ,you can reach us at sales@cloudagent.in or call us on our toll free at 1800 200 0820.