When operating a call center, do you ever find that schedules are hard to keep optimized when you have more call volume than you have qualified agents? Do you ever find that agents are spending too much time calling on customers who either never answer the phone or have changed their number? Have you experienced one of those days where you need to report on performance to people higher up in the organization and you just don’t have them?

Many of these questions will arise simply because you don’t have the right call center applications in place to ensure you can drive optimal performance at minimum cost. Call centers are no longer the phone and cubicle environment of yesterday. Today, your call center must rely on specific call center applications in order to operate efficiently and to deliver the value to the organization you were created to support.

One of the first must-have call center applications to prioritize in your budget is a workforce management solution. If you are still trying to schedule all of your employees through a manual process, you are doing too much with too little. Contact center software solutions help you to accurately forecast for upcoming budgets based on planned campaigns and historical data. That information is then combined with requested time off and availability in your employees to produce a scheduled that works for all.

The workforce management solution will also take into account all training hours and coaching sessions that must be completed during the day or week. If these sessions are not scheduled into your busy environment, they won’t happen and your performance will suffer. It is important to take advantage of such call center applications to ensure you can meet customer demands and produce a satisfying experience.

In situations where your agents are spending too much time trying to reach right contacts – you aren’t investing in predictive dialers. Call center applications that focus on this technology have gotten a bad reputation in the past simply because they were too messy and did not respect the time of the recipient. Predictive dialers that adhere to regulations within the industry can lend considerable value to the call center as they eliminate manual hours of dialing endless numbers that may or may not produce a connection.

Now that your agents are able to focus specifically on the task at hand, how do you measure for their performance? Sure, it is important that they are able to make a specific number of calls each hour, but how effective are they on each call? Without call monitoring solutions in place, your call center applications portfolio is not complete. You must be able to capture performance or you cannot increase the measurable within your center.

Keep in mind that all call center applications have a purpose, but some are designed to address unique needs within your specific field. While a customized solution can work wonders, do not implement any call center applications without a focused workforce management solution, predictive dialer and monitoring software. These must-have solutions really can make or break the overall success of your center.