Call centers are very important for customer satisfaction purposes. Customers call in when they have questions, need help, have complaints or want to learn more about the company. If there were no agents to take these calls, customer satisfaction levels would significantly decrease. With such importance resting on customer service, it is important to have effective software. Before purchasing any call center software, there are several essential features that companies should look for. They are as follows:

Customer Information. Call centers need to record information about the clients they come into contact with. The history of when people called, when they are called, what subjects were discussed and other details are all very important. When centers know all of this information, it can help them to better help and serve the people they talk to. Agents should be able to bring up this information from an online database. They should also be able to add notes, review other notes and look through the history of interactions using the call center software.

Calls Recorded. Most people hear the message "this call may be recorded for quality assurances" when they dial a service line. Recording calls is something contact centers do quite often in order to ensure the efficiency of a company. Not only are these used for training purposes, they are also used for quality assurance. Managers will sometimes listen to calls to see how agents deal with certain situations. The recorded conversations can also be referenced back to, if necessary.

In addition to calls being recorded, there is call center software that also features a record of client chats. This will save under the history of the client so that the agent can see it. Since the entire conversation will be saved, there will be no question as to what was actually discussed.

VOIP. VoIP is very important to have because it unifies communications between different departments. Otherwise known as voice over IP, this makes it possible to transfer calls without the need of special hardware. Agents at the contact center can easily transfer calls to one another without needing to hang up and change networks. Re-routing is quick, easy and very efficient when using VoIP. Whenever agents need to transfer their calls to other areas, they can do so within a couple of minutes. Customers appreciate not having to hold and the chances of being disconnected are very slim.

Self-Service Applications. A lot of customers enjoy being their own customer service agents. This is why self-checkouts exist at grocery stores today. The same applications that are available for call centers now allow customers to determine when and how they get in contact with a service. They can take care of transactions, request times to be called, check balances and do a lot more without having to talk to an agent.

You can get more information about Call Center Software and Predictive Dialing by visiting Vocalcom.