10 Best Call Center Tools Used by Support Agents

The success of a call center agency depends on how efficiently they are working while delivering the best customer service for their clients. While targeting to provide world-class customer support and enriched customer experience, call centers need to use different types of tools and software which will help in gathering customer insights while offering a faster customer response. In this blog, we are going to list down the best call center tools used by the support representatives for cutting down manual processes that lead to efficient customer support services.

Top 10 Call Center Tools for Improved Customer Support

Nowadays customers are more focused on getting a quicker response from their preferred brands apart from quality products. For maintaining above par customer experience and increasing the efficiency of each customer support representative, call center agencies to need to use different tools which we are going to discuss below.

1. CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is software used in the call center for managing customer data. Support agents instantly retrieve data like location, last point of contact, order history, etc. from CRM whenever a customer calls. Hence, customer service teams can efficiently solve customer issues faster while getting all the information at their fingertips. Also, CRM helps to gather data across all communication channels while using an omnichannel platform so that you can solve customer issues through the customers’ preferred contact channels.

2. Call Conferencing

Not a single customer wants to be on hold for a long time when they call the customer service team. With the help of call conferencing, inviting another person to the same call becomes easier rather than transferring back and forth. Secondly, call conferencing is used to train the support agents easily. Instead of listening to call recordings or reading the transcripts, support agents can listen to real-time conversations while the other person handles unusual or tricky situations. A call conferencing software is proven to be extremely beneficial for offering the best customer service.

3. Interactive Voice Response

Nowadays, most people are familiar with the interactive voice response whenever they call the customer service of a company. IVR is an automated system that has pre-recorded instructions or voice menus that ask the customers to choose from a particular list of options by pressing numbers on the dial pad. IVR is a great way to help customers choose the right option so any query can be solved quickly. It can speed up the problem resolution while getting customer information before the agents speak to them. To ensure these systems run smoothly and efficiently, businesses can rely on comprehensive IVR Testing services to identify and address issues before they impact the customer experience.

4. Call Barging

The term barging might sound discourteous; however, it is an essential way to maintain customer service quality. The call barging software allows the agents to listen to customer calls discreetly and join the call whenever necessary. Secondly, it also helps the team to check the quality of the calls on the spot and also improve the quality of the calls to the next level. Call barging helps the customer to speak to another agent easily without placing the call on hold, which helps the second agent to know all the information regarding the problem.

5. Real-Time Reporting

Many call center agencies provide you insights into a few metrics like updating real-time dashboards every 2 minutes to get a clear picture of the dashboard. A real-time reporting structure is useful while tracking the call volumes and the number of tickets that are closed. While spotting the trends in these indicators, you can avoid long queues of customers and the burned-out support agents easily while relocating the resources effectively. Agencies using real-time reporting in their call tracking system have a record of performing better.

6. Call Recording

The call recording feature is of utmost importance for any contact center because it is meant for keeping the customer interactions that may require in the future in any circumstances. However, call recording also helps in monitoring the call quality while checking the conversation style of the agents and also the level of compliance maintained by the support agents. Call recording also helps in serving the customers in a better way as it collects the audio both from inbound and outbound calls.

7. Predictive Dialers

Predictive dialers are in trend now in all customer support agencies as it dials automatically while predicting the right time for calling a certain customer. It has software that usually automates huge volumes of customer lists. Instead of typing manually, call centers use predictive dialers to call customers one after another. Support agents save a significant amount of time by not dialing the numbers manually or finding them in the database. As a result of this automation, support agents can free up their time to check the customer’s background and provide specific solutions.

8. Automatic Call Distribution

The call center agencies having a large number of customer care executives are known for having teams that are best suited for each kind of customer inquiry. In this case, automatic call distribution (ACD) helps in identifying the callers while putting them in a queue by routing them to the respective team automatically. Instead of clicking the number best suited for the query, ACD software uses the information present on the CRM to transfer the call to the respective team.

9. Help Desk Software

Not everyone wants to call customer care to solve any issue. Nowadays, an increasing category of people wants to use the FAQ section or the self-service option to solve their problems. Zendesk research says that almost 43% of the people use live chat, 63% of the customers use email, 22% use SMS, and the rest 22% rely on social media messengers to solve their minimal queries. Help desk software offers omnichannel customer support where the support agents know the mode of communication channels used by the customers. They can also provide the link to the FAQs in the web chat for solving queries.

10. Dashboard & Call Analytics

Call analytics is a crucial way to achieve your customer support goals. Real-time reporting and dashboard analytics is something that is used to improve the productivity of the support agents while automating the whole process and freeing up time for them. Call center metrics that can be used are inquiry types, average call time, customer sentiment, call volume, etc. Always check that these metrics are met in a predefined timeline so that you can have a track of your contact center performance while delivering the best customer service.

Summing Up

Running an efficient, friendly, and reliable call center requires a lot of effort to solve complex customer issues with utmost efficiency. While implementing the above-mentioned tools and software, you can easily offer the best-in-class customer service along with the enhanced productivity of your support agents.