Telephone Hotlines and Call Centers are often the first channel of communication customers turn to when looking for help or advice. Any bad customer experience on your hotlines can permanently damage your company’s reputation. Positive experiences on the other hand will keep your customers happy and satisfied with your services. Understanding a Call Centre is important, which is why in this article we will explain the core features and benefits of a Call Centre.
Overview
A Call Center is a centralized office or department that handles large volumes of both inbound and outbound calls from current and potential customers. Call Centers are typically located within an organization or outsourced to a company that offers call handling services.
What Features Should A Call Centre Have?
Not all Call Centre features and tools will be necessary for your organization. This is why it is important to determine what features your company needs before investing in a Call Center system. Highlighted below are some of the top features that help many businesses improve customer service and boost productivity.
1. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
An IVR is a recorded voice menu that allows callers to route themselves to specific departments within the Call Center by listening to prompts and pressing respective dial keys on their phone. This is an essential feature as it reduces agent workload and improves customer satisfaction.
2. Call Recording
Recorded calls on Call Centre systems are useful for agent training and quality assurance. The recordings enable supervisors to review agent responses to various handled calls and also for query resolutions that might be raised by customers. Another helpful thing about recorded calls is smooth handovers among call agents in instances where pending tasks have to be carried on by another agent due to unavailability of the agent that started the task. By simply listening to the recorded call between the previous agent and customer, the agent that takes over can easily catch up on the pending task and complete it or hand it over to another agent should they also become unavailable.
3. Reports & Analytics
Reports and analytics allow system admins and users to track metrics such as call durations, the number of inbound and outbound calls, dropped calls, costs, and more. Tracking these metrics helps managers and supervisors to make informed decisions on staffing, employee performance and training. Most Call Centre systems available on the market provide real-time statistics, letting you know what’s going on in the Call Center in real-time. Historical reporting tools are also available enabling the compilation of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual statistics for detailed long-term analysis.
4. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
The Call Centre ACD feature automatically routes callers to the most appropriate agents drastically reducing wasted time and resources. Automatic call routing is achieved via the system being able to detect if the caller and the agent have spoken before or by simply selecting the agents that have had the longest downtime since their last call.
5. Call Transfers
Call transfers ensure that agents are able to transfer calls from one department to another or transfer callers to different agents.
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