Call Center Systems

Business call centers provide customer services for callers. Contact center agents answer questions and complaints, and help clients with new products and features. Some examples includes utility companies and customer support for computer hardware and software (for example, Dell). Some businesses service internal functions through call centres, like help desks, retail financial support, and sales support. Ultimately, quickly handling calls and customer care are two critical call center functions. However, with the emergence of innovative technology platforms, call center systems are social and interactive, and give customers a greater variety of customer care options. This means less automated impersonal calls, and a higher rate of customer and agent happiness.

Future of Call Center Systems

Over the past few years, call center systems were owned and hosted on PBX equipment. While call centers still use this technology, more and more companies are switching to modern improvements. Some newer technologies include speech recognition. Instead of pressing the keypad when prompted, customers state the nature of their call and are properly routed to the appropriate department and best available agent. The end goal is better customer handling and minimized queue wait times.

Contact Center Platforms

Call center systems can access software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications via the web to handle customer social media, web calls or chats. This gives customers more alternatives for reaching out to contact centers with greater efficiency. Call center agents can also work remotely, like at home, in a virtual setting instead of being in a call center system environment. So having a cloud call center structure can work to a business owner’s advantage, especially on the financial front. For example, there is little upfront investment and infrastructure needs are extremely small, as the vendor is hosting the application.

New Call Center System Advantages – Going to the Cloud?

Businesses should consider different attributes when switching their call center systems to a new model platform. PaaS, or, platform-as-a-service, are software platforms made accessible in the cloud-matrix. This may be incredibly useful for small tech companies, for all companies, from start-up, non-profit organizations, to global enterprises. It all depends on how the company wants to achieve and develop certain goals.

Points to consider:

• Scalability – How will the new call center system grow? It might be cost-effective for smaller tech firms to introduce a cost-effective PaaS call center system that does not rely on employing an entire staff of agents.
• Performance – How is the customization and seamless integration for the call center system? Does it allow multiple software applications which enhance your customer care performance?
• Empowerment – With less hardware to install and maintain, there will be less IT responsibility.
• Cost – Hosting at another location remotely is a cost-effective solution. It should also be much easier to calculate the return on investment (ROI). Cloud technology keeps fees lows with no capital costs and no leased phone lines.
• New Tools – Implementing a new call center system will also give you greater access to better managing tools. Supervisors can manage agents and look over the virtual call center (and reconfigure as needed). Having on-demand access means managers can scale up or down quickly, depending on how the company grows and changes.