Call Management Software: What is it and why does your business need one?
If you’re part of your organization’s customer service team, you will be familiar with the term “call management.” But in case you aren’t, call management is the set of processes and systems businesses use to handle all incoming calls. It gives your business phone system a comprehensive view of inbound and outbound calls while ensuring your customers receive optimal responses within the promised turnaround time.
What is call management software, and how does it work?
A call management software handles and optimizes your customer calls. With the help of call management software, customer service managers can listen to recorded calls and provide feedback to agents on improving their performance.
Here’s how a call management software system works:
- Customer calls are intelligently routed based on call features and parameters set by the admin. The incoming business calls are then distributed to the suitable agent based on the customer intent, interaction history, time in queue, call time, date, location, or skills-based routing.
- As soon as the inbound call reaches the call management system, the number they call from is logged and compared against all other sources to learn about the most effective source. The call tracking system also records each caller’s name, number, and location for demographic segmentation.
- Call queues keep callers waiting if all customer support agents are busy. During the wait time, some callers can also get routed to IVR or self-service portal, or chatbots to get their issues resolved swiftly.
Apart from this, the call tracking system also supports the following features:
- Recording of outgoing calls
- Tracking customer data
- Real-time data recording
- Enhancing the overall customer experience
Common call management features your business phone system must have
Every business is unique and should evaluate a call management software after understanding its business needs. Here are some of the essential call management features that will help you to deliver a great customer engagement experience:
1. Contact Center Dashboard
A contact center dashboard is a reporting tool that displays the call metrics and KPIs to allow CS managers and teams to stay on top of all calls and team performance. The visual display simplifies analysis — reducing the time to consume information from hours to seconds. In a nutshell, the live dashboard aids in analyzing the best contact center management practices and optimizing agent performance.
2. Call Monitoring
Call monitoring or call listening helps supervise your phone teams in real-time and maintain the quality of your contact center’s conversations and resolutions. Using the call monitoring software, CX managers and admins can listen to live conversations between agents and customers/prospects and evaluate the effectiveness of their communication.
While call listening only involves listening to ongoing/live calls, call monitoring encompasses all agent-related information like availability, number of agents in conversation, number of agents online, and their service level adherence.
3. Call Barging
The call barging feature in call management software enables admins and supervisors to barge into calls if they feel their presence will enrich the quality of the ongoing conversation between the agent and the prospect/customer. Call barging is a vital contact center management technique that helps businesses improve their customers’ user experience by rescuing conversations that might lead them to lose critical accounts.
Advantages of call barging:
- Increase First Call Resolution: Managers or leads can easily jump into calls to understand customer needs and resolve issues faster.
- On-the-spot support: Agents can prevent escalations and endless call transfers by providing answers on the spot.
- Close deals faster: Sales agents can make informed business decisions based on the outcome of the calls – jump into calls and take your business closer to making the sale.
4. Contact Center Reporting
A contact center reporting tool helps you understand your virtual contact center’s micro and macro level working. The quality of your customer conversations directly impacts your deals, resolutions, hiring, etc. Thus, understanding the number of call transfers, hold time, average talk time, etc., enables you to identify improvement areas quickly.
In-depth contact center reporting is possible with a detailed analysis of your conversations with customers/prospects along with the performance of your contact center agents.
5. Call recording
Call recording captures audio and screen activity associated with inbound and outbound phone calls. With call recording, supervisors, and CS agents will be able to record conversations between an agent and a customer. The recorded calls will later be evaluated to scope for business growth.
Call recording provides greater visibility into the quality of customer conversations. CS managers and supervisors can listen to recordings, coach their support agents to serve customers better, follow up with existing customers who need assistance, or provide effective selling tips to close sales deals.
Why is call management important for businesses?
Businesses of all sizes from — startups to enterprises must interact seamlessly with their customers through telecommunications. A good call management system streamlines a business’s operations while providing customers with a delightful phone experience.
Call management = effective time management
#1 Improve Customer Service Management
An organization’s contact center is the first point of communication for customers reaching out to resolve their issues or raise concerns about a product or service. Hence when they make calls, they’d expect immediate guidance from the customer support team. However, when the call volume is high, it’s likely that your agents might not resolve tickets within the promised SLA and let your customer call land in voicemails. This creates a negative customer experience.
With call management software, you can fulfill all customer requests without dropping their experience, unlike emails where details are shared asynchronously. The tool works 24/7, which makes it great to complement the work of your contact center agents.
#2 Improve agent productivity
Time management is critical if you’re running a business. A call management system lets your agents spend less time on non-essential tasks and focus on high-priority tickets. Businesses of all sizes rely heavily on incoming phone calls. Hence, integrating an effective CRM into your phone system allows your company to stay on top of all call traffic. Agents benefit significantly from this because it reduces their workload and will enable them to manage their time in the most productive way possible.
#3 Proven to be cost-effective
A call management software is cost-effective since it drastically cuts down agent hiring costs. Usually, when a business faces higher call volumes, they hire customer service agents and add them to its first response team. However, if your company has call management software, the tool will streamline the call flows and ensure seamless customer service even on heavy call volume days. Investing in a call management software is a huge benefit as you will pay for a single tool in exchange for many features. Not to mention that call management software has built-in features to route calls and measure call metrics.
#4 Analyze and interpret customer data
‘Studies show that salespeople are 15% more productive if they have access to customer relationship management (CRM) data while on a call.’
Having access to recorded information makes a massive difference not only in the performance of your inbound call channel but also in the business’s marketing strategy and even in the business roadmap. Your customer calls will automatically get logged and recorded by integrating your CRM with your phone system using Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). Your CS agents can then share these recordings with sales and marketing teams to help them improve their strategy and increase customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Key features to look for in a call management software are:
- Scalable pricing for businesses of all sizes
- Real-time and historical analytics with customizable reports
- Scope for CRM software integration
- Availability of essential contact center functionalities like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)
- Multiple call routing options: skills, time-based, round-robin, list-based,
- Call queuing and automated callbacks.
- Call monitoring and quality monitoring.
- Call handling and call recording
- Power dialer feature to boost your outbound call center efficiency
- Workforce Optimization and Management
- Agent scripting and knowledge base articles to deflect agent tickets.
Freshdesk Contact Center can help you refine your call management techniques
To learn more about which contact center offers all of the above call management features — and much more — start by reading our overview of the best call center software. You may also benefit from omnichannel software, which offers contact center agents and customers additional communication channels instead of just phone calls.
