Are you launching a business or new service that requires a contact center platform? Or do you need to switch your call center to something with a better return on investment?
Your contact center is central to the quality of the customer service you can provide. While poor customer care leads to billions in lost revenue, better service can create higher client retention, cheaper customer acquisition, and increased profits.
Discover the key factors you can use to find the best contact center software for your operation.
Key Takeaways:
- A contact center platform is software that lets you operate your contact center from anywhere for a low cost.
- The best contact centers have easy setup and migration, excellent software integration, outstanding support, and simple scalability.
- Look for a contact center with business continuity, omnichannel communications, superb security, and access to employee analytics.
- A free trial lets you verify that a contact center is right for you.
What Is a Contact Center Platform?
Your contact center needs more than telephone lines and agents. Your company needs a platform (in other words, software) that operates the phone service and gives your agents tools to succeed.
The basic function of the software is to provide reliable online phone connectivity. A top contact center platform resides in the cloud, allowing you to use it anywhere and easily connect with remote teams.
Using a contemporary hosted contact center means your business doesn’t have to invest high upfront costs to begin call center operations. Your provider cares for maintenance and product upgrades offsite. Then you can launch with your own internet-connected devices.
What Are 8 Key Features Your Contact Center Platform Needs?
To find the best contact center, check that the service has the following features.
1. Easy Setup and Migration
A contact center platform that is a headache to set up may be a sign of more problems ahead. Look for a company that offers the support of onboarding experts for seamless installation and migration.
Simplicity and ease of use are critical if you’re already running a contact center and need to bring over existing phone numbers and data securely. You can’t afford to lose a piece of information or any functionality.
Ascertain that your new cloud communications provider will walk you through implementation and not send you to a migration consultant.
2. Software Integration
If you’re already using productivity software and collaboration apps, agents should be able to access those products within your contact center platform. A leading contact center makes doing so easy.
Your contact center also needs to integrate with the rest of your communications platform. While you might expect your company’s phone systems to work together seamlessly, not every provider offers a truly unified communications system.
Ensure your agents can connect quickly with internal parties for even faster service speed, better productivity, and improved service quality.
Video Embed: Unified Intermedia Unite® and Contact Center: A Brief Overview
3. Top-Rated Support
Moving to the cloud means you have to have total trust in your provider to help you when challenges arise. As a result, your contact center platform needs to have 24/7 technical support.
Flexibility with support means you can access quick assistance through multiple means, including phone, chat, or email. Confirm that the support team focuses on your success and offers regular updates on your situation until it resolves any issues.
4. Simple Scalability
What do you do when your company expands and you need more call center agents to handle the additional load? With your hosted contact center platform, you can have access to limitless lines. Simply use your administrative app to add new connections when you need them.
5. Business Continuity
Weather events and other disasters can disrupt your phone lines. An on-premise system is at the mercy of when local technicians can arrive.
A hosted contact center that relies on offsite data storage has redundancies in place that keep services available wherever you have an internet connection. Even if your central office has no power, you can operate your call center with mobile devices and minimize delays and downtime.
6. Omnichannel Communication
You need to be able to communicate with customers in whichever channels they prefer. An omnichannel contact center platform puts all those avenues in one user-friendly system.
You should have access to email, voice calls, video conferencing, web chat, and texting. Plus, your contact center platform lets you pull together details from separate conversations with an individual so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
7. Reporting and Insights
You can’t improve your team’s performance without clear insights from data. Look for a contact center with analytics and reporting that give you full visibility into key metrics.
You should also be able to create custom reports to determine agent and department performance. Also, artificial intelligence can transcribe, analyze, and provide insights into the sentiment of conversations to identify coaching and training opportunities.
8. Outstanding Security and Compliance
Your contact center platform likely deals with sensitive customer information and confidential company matters. Determine that your provider offers worry-free security with data encryption and meets compliance standards for the countries where you operate.
How Do You Narrow Down Your Search to the Right Contact Center Platform?
You can only find out how well a service works by test-driving it. Pick a selection team from your staff who will work with the software, including customer-facing agents, supervisors, and technical departments.
Take advantage of a trial period to put the contact center platform to the test and ensure it delivers on its promise. For example, Intermedia allows you to try out its service with a free 30-day trial to verify that it’s right for you.
Who Has the Best Contact Center Platform?
You want the best contact center software so you can offer outstanding service with a great ROI. Your communications provider needs to have top-of-the-line features and support to match.
Intermedia’s Contact Center has all the latest features and six-time award-winning client support. Talk to the team at Intermedia to learn how easy it is to set up the ultimate contact center platform.
Rob Oscanyan
Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.
May 18, 2023
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