Contact centers are the beating heart of most modern businesses. You can have the flashiest website or most functional app, but the familiarity and immediacy of communication with real human beings in your organization are what most customers respond to, building trust in your brand.
The best call center software features improve the business relationship between your customer service representatives and customers. Call center solutions for small businesses make your contact center easier to use for your customers while making the job easier and more satisfying to perform for your agents. Outbound call center software features make sales calls more efficient, and virtual call center features make performing customer support a cinch.
Let’s look at some top contact center features that can supercharge your customer-facing teams.
PowerDialer
A powerdialer or autodialer, like Kixie PowerCall, is an advanced interface for outbound calls. Taking advantage of the power of VoIP, a powerdialer can autodial a list of contacts one by one or even simultaneously.
With a powerdialer, a sales team can work on a list of contacts concurrently, making calls at the touch of a button. As they work through the list, the customers’ details are displayed on their screen, including any special information that will make their contact more likely to succeed.
At the end of the call, they again just click a button to record the outcome of the call and leave any notes of importance to the next agent. It’s easy to use and extremely fast, improving sales KPIs.
Voicemail Drop
Agents making these outbound calls often must leave voicemails as the customer doesn’t pick up. Manually leaving a voicemail each time is time-consuming, monotonous, and prone to error. Agents quickly get burned out on leaving voicemails, and this shows in their voices.
Voicemail drop is the answer. As soon as the agent knows the call is certain to go to voicemail, they can click a button to leave a pre-recorded voicemail with the customer. Each agent can have their own recorded voicemails, and they can add some personalization, too.
Perhaps the most important thing about voicemail drop is the agent is immediately free to move on to the next call. They don’t need to wait for the automated voicemail to be left before hanging up and moving on; the software handles this automatically for them. This can significantly improve performance in the call center as every agent is now capable of making many more calls each day.
Local Presence
People are four times more likely to answer a call from a local area code than one from a toll-free area code. You can capitalize on this by using local presence dialing. With this feature, wherever you are in the world, the phone calls you make will appear as coming from the recipient’s local area.
This is even more impressive when you consider how many area codes there are worldwide. Kixie supports global local presence, with over 50,000 numbers. You can create your own pool of numbers and set specific agents to use local presence, keeping costs low.
CRM Integration
Your customer relationship management (CRM) software is the focus of your customer service, storing all the data you have on your customers. CRM software is extremely impressive now, able to track customers across multiple channels, automate marketing, and provide insights into how best to keep your customers engaged.
Contact center software with bi-directional CRM integration takes advantage of the enormous potential of CRMs. Calls, texts, and voicemails you make in your contact center software, in this case, are automatically carried over to your CRM, saving a huge amount of manual data entry and upkeep.
In addition to this, you can use your contact center software from within your CRM if you choose the right contact center tools with bi-directional CRM support. Kixie works seamlessly from within all major CRMs, including Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, and HubSpot.
Call and Text Cadences
Customers rarely want to buy a product on their first contact with a company. A well-oiled sales team will have a great sales cadence that outlines all the steps that take a cold lead all the way to a loyal customer. Phone calls, texts, voicemails, emails, social media messages, newsletters, and website interactions are all touchpoints critical to any sales cadence.
Specifically looking at call centers and contact centers, the role of phone calls and texts in the sales cadence is essential. Therefore outbound calling and texting cadences are crucial when building automation in your sales. And with integration with Zapier, there’s almost nothing you can’t automate in the contact center, constantly improving your sales cadence success.
Live Call Coaching
Get your new agents up to speed quickly with live call coaching. You can be confident about putting less experienced agents on calls as you can listen to them in real-time. Even better, you can give them advice through their earpiece without the customer being able to hear. If the situation requires it, you can start a third-party call or even take over the call entirely, all at the click of a button.
New hires can listen in live to calls made by experienced agents, giving them an excellent demonstration of how to handle particular types of calls. And with call recording, you can replay good (or bad) calls in training to show agents what’s expected of them and how they can improve.
IVR Auto Attendant
An IVR (interactive voice response) system allows your customers to navigate to the correct department simply by answering questions posed by your automated system. It saves them from being transferred between departments and reduces the amount of time your agents need to spend on the phone.
Advanced use of IVR can allow customers to access certain services themselves without ever needing to speak to a human at all. Or, it can speed up the process of connecting an incoming caller with the appropriate service department.
These are just the tip of the iceberg regarding the unique features you get from modern contact center software. By using these features, you can spend much less money on your contact center upkeep while offering much-improved customer service.
