15 Essential Call Center Features for Your Business in 2023

A seamless call center operation is an essential aspect for businesses that want to provide superior customer service and boost customer satisfaction.

Activities in a call center play a major role in business operations. Call center operation determines the quality of your customer service as well as customer satisfaction. So you need reliable and scalable call center software, which aids you in providing exceptional customer service quickly and effectively.

Every business needs a call center to handle all customer questions and concerns. It offers clients many more services than just picking up calls and providing them with good service at times. From monitoring to tracking and managing client calls, call center proves to be a much-needed solution for seamless operations.

Essential Call Center Features for Your Business in 2023

Modern call center software use cloud-based infrastructure and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to seamlessly handle inbound and outbound calls. Using these progressive call center systems, businesses can have access to advanced capabilities.

In the meantime, however, the feature set offered by each call center software is different. Having such a variety can leave you confused and miss the whole point of using them.

In order to establish a successful call center, you must ensure that the call management system you intend to install has these essential features;

1. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

You can offer your customers the option of speaking with an automated system before getting in touch with your support staff through IVR. Implementing IVR has many advantages. To begin with, it gives you the opportunity to obtain information about the caller and their intended purpose and to route them to the most suitable agent for their needs at the time.

Moreover, IVR offers other options as well. With it, all phone users can navigate through options simply by pressing buttons or even by speaking. In fact, IVR feature in call center services can greatly help your callers without ever having to speak to customer service.

2. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

With Automatic Call Distribution, inbound calls are routed to the agent or department best suited to customer inquiries. The ACD process occurs behind the scenes after an individual chooses an option from the IVR menu and before being matched with an appropriate agent.

The distribution actually will depend on a number of factors – the caller’s ID, the agent’s availability, and their knowledge and skills. ACD acts according to the routing policy you define. Regardless of how you configure your settings, both callers and agents can benefit from ACD.

You should consider these things when looking for an ACD:

i. Round-Robin Distribution

In Round-Robin Distribution, calls are routed in a loop to evenly distribute to all agents. Calls are routed from the first to the last agent to make sure no agent is burdened with numerous calls simultaneously.

ii. Uniform Call Distribution

With Uniform Call Distribution, you can create a fair process by routing long-running calls to the agent who has been idle the longest. It makes sure that no agent is overworked at the expense of others who are idle.

iii. Simultaneous Call Distribution

Here, all available agents receive calls simultaneously, so whoever picks it up is just the first to reach out to them. This feature is ideal for smaller businesses with no dedicated support staff.

iv. Weighted Call Distribution

Here, each agent is assigned a specific weight based on their experience or skills. The specific weight here simply refers to the pre-assigned call volume percentage. Calls are routed to the appropriate agent based on their weight, so more experienced agents handle the complexity of the calls.

v. Skill-based Routing

Essentially, skill-based routing places customers with agents who have the right skills to handle their concerns. For instance, clients who speak Japanese will be assigned to agents who can speak Japanese.

The Hubspot study found that 40% of customers want customer service reps to respond to their needs faster, and more than 60% of them expect an agent to be able to respond to their particular needs. ACD is a reliable way to enhance overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Also Read: 5 Essential Training Required for Call Center Agents

3. Call Recording

When it comes to ensuring the efficiency of call center agents, recording call conversations is an essential tool. Call recordings help to ensure agents are adhering to compliance rules and monitoring problems customers may be experiencing.

It is easy to monitor which agents need to be better trained when using the call recording feature. After all, identifying patterns in customer issues can serve as the basis for more processes and procedures for better customer service.

Whenever you receive a negative response from a customer, you can reexamine the interaction to see what went wrong. Further, recorded calls allow you to identify weak points within your team so you can build strategies that enable improvement.

4. Call monitoring

Using the call monitoring feature, a third party can monitor calls while they are in progress. This is useful for supervising new agents while they are training. Monitoring calls can also provide insight into the needs of the customer. This information might be useful because, based on the insight, they can decide how to change sales materials or product offerings.

Additionally, this will help you to track agent performance and use the information to guide future training, guidance, and resource provision for your team. Some call monitoring systems can go beyond the capability of listening in, giving managers the ability to interact with callers and agents

5. CRM and Business Tool Integration

Integrating different tools facilitates communication and data exchange between them. A call center phone system does a good job of handling your call traffic, but there are probably many other applications in your business that handle your agents, customers, leads, and tasks.

By integrating your call center data with other applications, such as customer relationship management systems, calendars, and workforce management tools, you are able to get the most out of your technology.

Integration is essential because they add a layer of business intelligence that your software wouldn’t be able to provide on its own. For instance, when your agents use data from your CRM software, they can quickly understand the customer’s journey, past conversations, and how best to offer a more personalized solution to the customer.

6. Real-time insights and analytics

Using this feature, call center businesses can easily gather important data. The software generates various reports that allow for intelligent decision-making. Call center business operations are streamlined with real-time insights. The benefits of this feature include increased visibility through a 360° view of interactions, improved conversion rates, reduced agent turnover, and enhanced customer support.

7. Voicemail Drop

A prerecorded voicemail or voicemail dropping is simply putting a prerecorded message in somebody’s voicemail box. There is no ringing on the phone, but they do receive a notification about a new message.

Customers literally find this feature a great time saver because it takes less time to record one message and send it instantly rather than individually calling dozens of numbers, waiting for the call to go to voicemail, listening to the greeting, and leaving a message. In addition, companies with a high sales volume can benefit heavily from voicemail drops.

8. Predictive Dialer

One of the key features of call center software is allowing a way of connecting agents to incoming calls as soon as they are available to take a call. Predictive dialers change the dialing rate based on the average call answer time and agent availability to reduce call-drop ratios and wait times.

Connecting calls to agents only when the customer picks up the phone optimizes call center operations and improves productivity. An intelligent predictive dialer can increase your call connect ratio, provide multiple dialing modes, and improve your agent’s efficiency.

9. Omnichannel Communications

Having an omnichannel call center gives customers the freedom to choose the support channels that are most comfortable for them. Callers can select from a number of methods such as voice calls, emails, chats, videos, and even social media.

Each of these channels operates independently, but after every interaction, all conversations across each channel are synced and updated. As not every customer prefers voice calls, omnichannel communication helps to enhance customer satisfaction.

10. Toll-free Phone Numbers

With toll-free numbers, your customers can call without incurring any charges for making calls, and their calls can be routed to any VoIP phone line or IP PBX system.

There are countless benefits to having a toll-free number, and it goes beyond just brand recognition and credibility. It saves a significant amount on your costs and generates more leads for your business, thus increasing your sales and Return-of-Investment (ROI).

11. Auto Attendant

Auto-attendant efficiently funnels calls and direct callers to the right people or department. Auto-attendant greets the direct callers in accordance with the menu options (usually extensions or departments to be forwarded to) they select.

This means you are never going to miss customer service calls or sales opportunities. With this VoIP feature, callers enjoy a better experience by reducing transfer calls, prioritizing self-service, and directing VIP calls to an automated receptionist.

12. Conference Calls

Conference calls made over a VoIP phone line involve multi-participant speaking together. Modern business phone systems feature conference calling as a standard feature. VoIP offers high-definition voice calls and allows callers to join the conference using their mobile phone, landline, or computer. Conference calls are therefore more clear thanks to the latest audio technology incorporated in it. And since the calls often travel through fewer hops, they are often faster as well.

13. Business hours

With a good VoIP phone system, you can not only set up essential features such as automatic call distribution and voicemail but also set business hours rules and decide how and where to route your inbound calls.

During business hours, you can set up automatic call distribution so that when you are closed, your calls will be routed to voicemail or to another destination. There is also the possibility to set different times for different days so that your phones reflect your working schedule if you have an early closing or close over the weekend.

14. Call Queueing

Call queues are used to handle incoming calls and place them in line for answering when your team is occupied with other calls. In the meantime, hold-on music is played until an agent becomes available. The advantage of queuing calls to businesses is that they can provide efficient call routing to staff without sacrificing availability to incoming callers.

15. Mobile Applications

The majority of today’s call center software solutions are mobile-friendly and include mobile applications for smartphones and tablets, allowing employees to access business communication on the go.

The portability of applications is indeed an enormous benefit considering agents are not always present at their desks. There are currently many call center solutions available for iOS and Android, including call routing, texting, email, reports, and a variety of other features.

Conclusion

Today’s call centers need more than just making and taking calls. Their phone systems need to handle large call volumes and drive customer satisfaction. With features like ACD, IVR, and call monitoring, your agents can be more productive and improve customer service. You can also offer omnichannel support to ensure that your audience gets help whenever they need it.

We at KrispCall provide you with some of the best features for call center software to revolutionize your business.  And since the software and cloud telephony platform is available at a dirt-cheap price, it further helps to increase your business ROI.

You get one more benefit while doing business with KrispCall. For first-time users, KrispCall is offering a Schedule Free KrispCall demo now. So you can explore the features yourself before subscribing to its services.