Customers today prefer to reach out to support teams through their preferred communication channels - email, social media, phone calls, or messaging channels. To create friction-free customer experiences, you need a contact center software that supports a unified customer service experience across all channels for agents and customers alike.

This guide will help you identify the right contact center software for your business. Read on to learn:

What is contact center software?

A contact center software is a technology solution that manages all conversations between contact center agents and customers. It helps businesses offer omnichannel customer service and customer relationship management. It even offers a unified view of all customer communications across various communication channels, including phone calls, email, social media, SMS, and messaging apps or live chat.

What is call center software?

A call center solution offers myriad benefits like automatic call routing, call recording, and even self-service options. The ideal call center software will help your organization provide superior customer support with maximum automation and minimum manual effort. A good call center software should be able to provide rich performance insights with call monitoring. Due to the shift in the power dynamic between customers and businesses, customers today require exceptional customer experiences. This also means that call center software should come with all the advanced features to be able to scale up the customer experience. Customers also look for a unified platform that manages all call center operations.

Types of contact center software

There are two types of contact center solutions:

The two types of contact center software differ based on how they are hosted. While an on-premise solution is hosted on a business’s local server, a cloud-based contact center software is hosted over the internet.

On-premise contact center software

You can deploy an on-premise solution with the help of an experienced IT professional and the hosted partner. Since the contact center platform is hosted on the company’s server, you will have limitations around access to this tool outside your office premises. 

Businesses using an on-premise solution invest heavily in security features to protect customer data and mitigate cross-site scripting. However, whenever the system needs to be updated and upgraded with new features to support the team, it requires a shutdown of business operations. 

Cloud contact center software

A cloud contact center is hosted on the cloud, a virtual server, from where the agents manage all inbound and outbound interactions. You can get started with a cloud-based contact center in no time. All you need is to create an account for your company on the contact center platform and just log in to the tool. Once you have set up your software, your team can access the cloud-based contact center from anywhere as long as there is a live network connection. 

The best part about deploying a cloud-based contact center solution is that the service providers are responsible for securing your customer information and business data. Even when your software needs an update from the service provider, the upgrade happens in sync with your workflows so that there are no lags in performance.

What is the best contact center software?

Freshcaller software comes with all the essential features of a contact center software, including advanced features. It is intuitive, always-on and an all-in-one contact center software. Say goodbye to missed calls and get ready for lower wait times with Freshcaller . It is designed for a remote workforce, and it enables real-time collaboration and resolution of complex issues. Agents’ workload is reduced and conversations can be continued seamlessly across channels

The benefits of a contact center software

Reduced costs

A contact center solution can help you reduce your contact center costs by 50% by saving on agent licenses with Freshdesk’s chat and telephony capabilities.

Easy collaboration

Empower your contact center agents to deliver faster resolutions by collaborating with the right people within and outside your company. Try Freshdesk call routing to redirect customer calls to the right agent.

Seamless integrations

Do more with your contact center software by integrating it with the right apps. Get started with Freshdesk's flexible APIs and 650+ integrations, including CRM integrations and billing tools.

Quality assurance

Empower your contact center agents to provide the best customer support. Freshesk’s quality management functionality helps you handle those inbound calls and deliver a seamless customer experience.

Workforce management

A contact center software will simplify workforce management for you by facilitating shift schedules, taking care of planning and forecasting, and streamlining operations in real-time for your agents working around the globe. 

Essential features of a contact center software

Call Monitoring

A call center software enables supervisors and managers to monitor, route, and even join live calls if they need to speak to a customer to deescalate a situation. A holistic contact center solution like Freshdesk Omnichannel empowers agents with an ACD (automatic call distribution) phone system to ensure that calls are routed to the right agents in the shortest possible time. This way, your team will spend more time attending calls that fall under their expertise, have fewer escalations to handle, and eventually result in faster resolution time and higher customer satisfaction.

Omnichannel dashboard

A contact center software streamlines all incoming requests from different communication channels into one platform. For example, Freshdesk contact center software comes with an in-built omnichannel dashboard that offers visibility into SLA compliance and helps you track call center KPIs from a single screen. With all tracking metrics available on a single screen, you don’t have to be on-premise with your team to monitor your call center performance.

Performance reporting

An ideal call center software offers a reporting functionality to measure your call center’s performance using metrics like average wait time, handle time, and hold times. The real-time KPI dashboard in Freshcaller Software also offers a custom report capability that allows you to schedule your reports and add filters to your data. The custom report builder can utilize every interaction metric and convert that into data sets that can be used for analyzing customer queries, the performance of teams, and the trends across communication channels.

How to choose the right contact center solution?

Based on the nature of your organization and the workflow, you can choose between the two types of contact center solutions: on-premise and cloud-based solutions. Once you have identified the type of contact center solution, you need to look for features that will enable your team to reach their optimal production level and delight your customers. 

Here is the list of essential features that the Freshdesk contact center solution has to offer:

Contextual conversations

Your agents should be able to resolve queries quickly and efficiently and automatically route customer requests from all channels to the right agent or team. A contact center software should enable agents to get enough context by viewing the details of the complete customer journey and have the liberty to add notes to each ticket before passing on the interaction to the new team/agent.

Unified self-service

Maintain a single knowledge base that you can use on your website, customer portal, chat widget, and chatbot. A unified self-service functionality helps you offer voice assistance around the clock using an interactive voice response (IVR) or voice bot.

App integrations

If your contact center software is integrated with your help desk software, agents can stay updated on where they last left the conversation before getting on the next call with a customer. Freshdesk Omnichannel seamlessly integrates the help desk and contact center software into one and fits right into your existing ecosystem, allowing you to integrate with the different apps you use.

The best contact center software for your business

This guide lists the top 4 contact center software solutions that you can choose from.

#1 Freshcaller

Freshcaller makes it easy for agents to provide exceptional voice service with this intuitive, all-in-one contact center solution. Formerly known as Freshcaller Freshdesk’s cloud-based contact center solution is a minimum fuss solution designed to maximize delight by helping agents to eliminate missed calls and lowering wait times. It enables personalized, high-quality, and secure calls.

 

#2 Five9

The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center makes it easy for your business to engage customers on their channel of choice using omnichannel routing capability. This helps agents to provide the type of intuitive, personalized, and more human experience customers want. The best part is that you get access to the full integration of Five9 in Freshdesk Mint. The most important features include-

Pricing starts at: $149/month*

*Free trial not available

 

#3 Genesys

The Genesys Contact Center Software helps agents respond to customer queries in real-time via your website, social media channels, and live chat. The basic features offered by Genesys are:

Freshdesk also allows integration with the Genesys CTI connector to help grow your business exponentially and creates a good reputation by offering a personalized customer experience. The integration enables your teams to customize to an industry-specific agent interface, collaborate seamlessly, and get a unified view of all metrics.

Pricing starts at: $75/month*

*Free trial available for 30 days

 

#4 Hubspot

The Hubspot call tracking software helps your teams to easily prioritize your sales calls, make calls directly from your browser, and automatically track them in your CRM.

Here are a few features that come with your Hubspot subscription:

You can even integrate Hubspot with Freshdesk and enable your support and sales teams to stay up to date. This integration allows agents to access Hubspot CRM contacts, companies, and deals within Freshdesk. They can view contact lists associated with a contact, create new contacts from a ticket, and view deals, including deal pipeline and deal stage associated with a contact.

Pricing starts at: $45/month*

*Free trial available for 30 days

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