Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Call Center Software In The Cloud

By Jerry Obram


The telephone is still the ideal and most effective support channel for individuals that are in search of customer service. But developing a traditional call center is a really confusing and sometimes cost prohibitive undertaking. This is the reason that cloud based call center software was developed. Call center software may make or break your operation and there are so many alternatives currently available that a decision can be extremely hard. Maybe you are starting fresh? Do you expand anything you currently have? How is it possible to keep up with the frequent upgrades and innovations which are continually being presented to the marketplace?

Some of the most convenient call center solutions these days work in the cloud. With your call center software running in the cloud, you can eliminate all the charges which can be incurred by managing your own on-site call center. The makeup of your team will be a crucial factor in choosing the best call center software solution. In today's corporate environment, agile organizations can run call centers that employ home based personnel, onshore and foreign contractors, or established office employees. Virtual call center solutions have become a better option for the companies that want to restrict the footprint of their private data center. Several of the large competitors in the call center software marketplace, similar to SalesForce.com, deliver cloud based call center services for both big and small enterprises. There are software that allows agents to work together on cases, and benefit from telephone, email, and web communications at one time.These particular solutions can be quite efficient and highly effective in the long run.If you want to concentrate on your call center rather than your IT infrastructure, a cloud based solution is regarded as the most appropriate choice.

Call center software organizations like Zendesk are producing stunning value propositions for call centers that are looking for to simplify their operations. They are also eradicating the obstacles that are so frequently connected with call center setup and provisioning. From their smart user interface design, to their monthly payment structure, they have made it simple for just about any organization to start a call center and scale it up or down as the business needs. Improvements in workforce effectiveness and improvements in customer satisfaction can be attained by making changes from traditional call center techniques, to cloud based processes. Other neat capabilities like Wordpress platform integration and highly developed analytic functionality make this call center software solution among the most impressive on the market today.

For companies that already have a standard call center, there are opportunities to complement current infrastructure to take full advantage of existing investments. Call center software providers like AVAYA and other VoIP based solution providers offer extremely good solutions for the call center. Most of these solutions provide multimedia collaboration functions using email, text, chat, instant messaging, social media, together with the more conventional voice and fax. Some of the large call center software solution distributors provide open architectures that allow for full SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) integration and open web service architecture for integration with other central and external business programs and procedures. Innovative call center user interfaces allow the agent to simultaneously deal with several contacts with multiple media channels. So agents who have accepted a web chat for example, can manage an electronic mail contact simultaneously. This is likely to be a major boost to agent performance and efficiency.

Businesses that prefer to incorporate social media into their call center processes have many options too. The opportunities to take full advantage of social networking within your call center software solution are expanding everyday. Providers like MPLsystems enable firms to make a better use of social media campaigns with innovative social media monitoring resources, in addition to a social media customer service portal. Service agents are able to keep track of and deal with requests and comments made by way of social media sites such as Facebook. Yet another creative provider known as LiveOps is a call center software provider that offers a single integrated agent desktop that deals with questions from all of your support service channels simultaneously.

In the end, probably the most important characteristics of any call center software solution is 'ease of use'. If the software isn't simple to use, or if perhaps it has a really huge learning curve, you can kiss your return on your investment good bye. It is very important that you complete all the necessary due diligence prior to you buying a call center software solution. Ask the tough questions and capitalize on as many free trials and demonstrations as possible. With the amount of call center software solutions in the marketplace, you will have to educate yourself in order to make the correct selection.




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