Call Center Software

Call Center software: purchase guide

A complete guide to call center software

Call center software is a commercial management tool, designed for very small businesses and SMEs that want to move towards a more ambitious future. 

A prospect or customer who waits too long or feels unwelcome may not keep doing business with you. Take care of customer relations by improving your contact center and your phone customer service. 

What is call center software?

Call center software is designed to provide unified communications, develop a telemarketing strategy, and improve customer management processes. It provides the link between IT and the phone center which allows you to make phone calls with a single click and improve sales management procedures. 

With a call center software, you can set up pre-recorded messages (Interactive Voice Server) in order to route requests as efficiently as possible to the right person. Moreover, you can supervise your employees' training, record conversations to analyze the exchange, then suggest areas for improvement. 

What are the features of a good call center software? 

There are a large number of CRM tools and prospecting software, but they do not all have the same level of performance. Before you start, try to determine your company's needs so that you don't invest in software that is too complex. To guide you, here are some features that most call center software have:

• Phone integration: It provides you with a one-click connection thanks to predictive or progressive dialling. Don't waste any more time dialling numbers. 
• Multi-site management: Your company is spread over several web domains? No problem, the call center software allows you to manage all of your websites in one place. 
• Listening and real-time surveillance: Pay attention to your employees' answers and provide guidance without the customer being able to hear your voice.
• Segmentation of contact lists to better understand your core target audience.
• Automation: Programmed reminders, call logging and conversation recording
• Real-time performance analysis
• Access to prospect and customer files: obtain the history of conversations already carried out for a personalized approach.
• VoIP support, integration with your other software solutions or CRM tools. 

Why are call center software an asset for your company?

Phone support and hotline services are essential to most companies. It can convey a positive or negative brand image but can also be a performance tool. If you can't process all requests quickly, you may disappoint some of your customers or miss deals to close with new prospects. Most large companies have understood the importance of welcoming their customers. By choosing a call center software, you benefit from:

• More agile commercial activity or customer management processes.
• Clearer, more efficient, and professional contact management solutions.
• Greater efficiency of your sales or administrative teams.
• Better collaboration through information sharing and permanent access to customer and prospect records.
• More competitiveness by answering more phone calls.
• Unified communications by following protocols.
• A more efficient appointment scheduling.
• Direct marketing actions and sales processes that reach their targets.

SaaS vs in-house Solutions

Both call center software solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. We would tend to advocate for SaaS solutions because it is faster to get started and technical support is provided. SaaS also has the advantage of being constantly updated and highly scalable. 

However, you must agree to place all your company's data on a remote platform that can never fully guarantee infallible security. Nevertheless, many efforts have been made to offer a very high level of security, and modern cloud hosts offer secure protocols.

Best Cloud-based Call Center Software

• Genesys Pure Cloud

• Salesforce Cloud

• LiveAgent

• Cloudtalk 

• Ringover

Our final piece of advice: test it! Testing a solution is the best thing to do before investing in call center software. Many publishers give you access to a free trial period. Feel free to try several of them in order to choose the most appropriate one.