As the era changes, businesses are proceeding towards being customer-centric. Along with focusing on product and price, customer experience is also changing the business game.
To deliver exceptional customer service there needs to be a focused group that caters to the customer, their requirements, their queries, and more.
This specific group catering to customer queries is categorized under call or contact centers.
Know the difference between a call center and a contact center
Call and contact centers are the key pillars for customer queries and satisfaction.
The primary difference between them is the type of communication channels they support.
The Call center primarily focuses on handling queries through inbound and outbound voice calls, whereas contact centers support multiple communication channels beyond just phone calls. These include email, chat, social media, SMS, video, and sometimes even fax.
What Is Contact Center Technology?
Technologies and software used in contact centers to handle consumer complaints, questions, and interactions through various means of communication could be grouped as contact center technology.
Communication in today’s world is not just limited to calls and voice, it has expanded to other means of digital channels which include emails, SMS, chatbots, social media comments, X, etc, hence contact center technologies have also gained momentum in these channels as well.
Due to successful contact center technologies, the agents remain satisfied, customers are happy and which in turn leads the business into profitability and better shape.
| 💡Read more | Happy Agents = Happy Customers |
Need for Contact Center Technology
As we saw a difference between the two, it has been now clear that these centers require a multitude of technologies to function smoothly.
These technologies are crucial for improving the efficiency and performance of customer service operations. It helps in streamlining communication, enhances agent productivity, and improves customer experiences.
Categories of technologies used in contact centers
Contact centers are the holy grail for customer experience which in turn helps in business development, brand equity, and profitability. Therefore, many core technologies are deployed in these contact centers to help agent run their operations smoothly.
These technologies are a helping hand to agents to manage call volume, customer queries, and more. The three core technologies are mentioned below:
Automation – Automate outbound dialing, leave pre-recorded voicemails, or schedule callbacks using call center technologies that streamline repetitive tasks, reduce manual efforts, and minimize the chances of human error.
Integration – Connect your sales, CRM, and call center software to ensure continuous data sharing, leading to better collaboration and productivity.
This integration provides agents with a unified view of past conversations, and by collecting data from various channels including email, SMS, messaging apps, calls, and social media, it helps in improvizing sales strategies and enables agents with insights about any potential topics of discussion.
Analysis – Solving queries goes beyond just calls, it requires an in-depth study of identifying patterns and trends of calls which is achieved through analytics.
Advanced analytics, including intricate metric modeling and the processing of vast data sets, can now be completed in real time, allowing businesses to identify common customer interests or challenges.
Through sentimental analysis, agents can analyze the caller’s mood, which in turn helps them adjust their approach and conversation accordingly.
| 💡Read more | Contact Center Trends: What’s Next? |
Different Types of Call Center Technologies
We have discussed the core technologies. In a broader sense. Now let’s deep dive into the more specific terms as to what goes behind the screens of agents.
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
ACD or Automatic call distribution is a telephony system that helps in re-directing incoming calls to the relevant agent and department. It is able to recognize the agent’s availability, skill set, call priority, and other factors.
Using ACDs to direct calls to relevant agents the contact center stats such as FCRs [First call resolutions], AHTs [Average call handling time], CSATs [Customer satisfaction score] and NPS [Net promoter score] could be skyrocketed.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Communication becomes easier now with Interactive Voice Response, a cutting-edge technology that allows customers to communicate with bots or automated systems with the use of their voice or keypad inputs.
These technologies are designed to reduce the time and effort of an agent by automating simple or unimportant customer interactions without involving the agent.
Customers can self-serve using these IVRs and reduce agents’ time and efforts leading to better performance and efficiency.
Key Functions of IVR
Call Routing: IVR can help redirect the call to the relevant department and agent by taking prior notes of customer queries.
Examples include – “Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Support,” or similar options.
Self-Service Options: Give your agent rest by directing the customer in the right direction. Self-service options through IVR give the customer an option to perform certain actions like checking balance, tracking orders, and bill payment by themselves without having a dependency on an agent.
Data Collection: Data collection is now the MVP of any caller interaction with an agent. Thus, IVR helps jot down the information from the caller before any agent gets involved.
This feature of IVR in turn leads to reduced AHTs and higher FCRs.
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
CTI connectors or computer telephony connectors help to integrate your telephony with a business CRM. This provides a unified view of agent tasks and reduces toggle time for agents.
One of the smarter ways to implement CTIs is deploying Smart CTI Connectors by NovelVox.
These CTI Connectors transform contact center operations to deliver better customer service with automated workflow and simplified interactions between the agent and the customer.
Omnichannel Support
Evolving time requires upgraded technology. Hence, restricting to a single channel of communication might not fit well within your call centers.
Be smart and deploy smart call center technology like CX Infinity. CXI or CX Infinity is an all-in-one customer engagement platform.
Integrate CXInfinity with popular telephony systems to enable your support team to handle conversations across voice and digital channels from one unified platform.
Become one step closer to your customers and engage across digital channels.
Call center Wallboards
Another call center technology in use is wallboards. These wallboards are display boards with the performance metrics of agents. These are being supervised by the management to get an overview of the system and the agent’s performance.
Call center wallboards give us the key indicators where supervisors can help identify & reward the top-performing agent and at the same time motivate the others.
A fallable solution to call center wallboards is iVision Plus. Discover some of the USPs of these technologies.
Chatbots and AI-Powered Assistants
Chatbots have hit the right nerve in the new-gen digital world. The use of chatbots has increased exponentially across different industries. Chatbots like Infibot help in taking the preliminary information about customer queries and also help acknowledge what customers might be searching for.
They are now the crucial element in identifying customer points. They can handle routine customer inquiries and provide 24/7 support and can assist agents by providing relevant information & responses during interactions.
With chatbots being the center of assistance, let us discuss infibot which offers seamless solutions to all agent’s problems.
Unified Agent Desktops
An agent needs to be a multitasker! But they are still capable of making errors in their approaches and work, hence reducing their workload and providing a unified view to them goes a long way.
This is done through a Unified Agent Desktop, a software interface designed by consolidating all necessary tools, applications, and customer information into a single, integrated view.
A unified agent desktop removes the toggle time between multiple systems, thereby reducing errors and confusion amongst the agents. To me, the unified agent desktop is more enticing and helps agents achieve their targets, check out Agent Accelerator.
What is Agent Accelerator?
Agent Accelerator is a unified agent desktop with exceptional integration & optimization capabilities. It gives your agents a unified view of all the customer details right on their screen even before the call is answered.
With all relevant information at the fingertips, the agents resolve queries faster, which further enhances Customer Satisfaction, reduces Average Handling Time, and improves Net Promoter Score.
Benefits of Call Center Technologies
Concerning the above-mentioned points, it can be concluded that call center technologies are needed for an hour. With exponential growth in businesses and industries, contact centers are growing at higher-than-expected rates.
With these numbers, the agents are bound to feel overburdened and crushed with the weight of satisfying customers, hence call center technologies come to the rescue.
Check out some of the basic benefits that these technologies offer to agents, making them empowered, passionate, motivated, and fuelled with energy.
Enriched customer experience – IVR, ACD, and other similar technologies make sure that calls are directed to the right agent and also allow self-service options that resonate well with the Gen-Zs.
Enhanced Agent Efficiency – Agent Accelerators, and Smart CTI Connectors are the trump card that automates and provides a unified view for an agent, leading to less toggle time to reduce waste and maintain a high efficiency.
Better stats for call centers – Govern your call center stats through iVision Plus, a contact center wallboard that displays all the relevant numbers to identify the lag in service and analyze performance & work towards its improvement.
Omnichannel Support – Reach out to your customers through various digital channels instead of restricting through calls. Enable self-service and assist your agents better through CX Infinity, which helps not only in resolving queries across different platforms but also is an excellent option for co-browsing software.
Cost Efficient – These new-gen call center technologies help in reducing overall operational costs, making the call centers more efficient and easier to run, all the while maintaining an excellent service level.
Call center cloud technology – Give your agent the comfort of working from home with cloud-based call center technologies that enable agents to work from anywhere, ensuring flexibility for businesses and maintaining operations even in remote work environments.
Wrapping Up!
In conclusion, call center technologies have become essential in today’s customer-focused business world. As customer expectations rise, businesses need to adopt tools like IVR, ACD, chatbots, and unified agent desktops to provide smooth, personalized support across multiple channels.
These technologies not only improve the customer experience by cutting down on wait times and offering self-service options, but they also make it easier for agents to work efficiently, reducing mistakes and boosting key metrics like First Call Resolution (FCR) and Average Handling Time (AHT).
Modern contact centers, with their omnichannel capabilities, allow for more seamless interactions across phone, email, chat, and social media, letting businesses meet customers wherever they are. Cloud-based systems and real-time analytics add flexibility, helping businesses run smoothly even in remote or hybrid work settings.
Overall, these technologies enhance operations, improve customer satisfaction, and contribute to long-term business success by making agents more effective and building stronger customer loyalty.
