12 Call Center Tools Your Sales & Support Team Needs
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Modern businesses may struggle or even fail to deliver better customer support service to customers, which can negatively impact their brand. It may result in losing a significant chance of increasing their potential revenue.
Call center tools assist businesses in overcoming challenges and identifying opportunities to close deals, generate leads, and increase sales revenue.
What Are Call Center Tools or Software?
Call center tools are software that provides the omnichannel support system with effective call management capabilities to automate calls for operational efficiency.
The tools positively impact your business communication and customer service experience through call automation and management features like call forwarding, Automatic Call Distributions (ACD), and Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
Customer support and sales agents can focus on complex and human-required tasks, including closing deals, resolving complex issues, and building customer relations to maximize potential sales revenue.
Importance of Call Center Tools for the Sales & Support Team
By managing internal and external calls effectively, Call center tools can assist agents in boosting customer experience, tailored interaction, and service.
Enhance customer service and experience
Call center solutions enhance customer service and experience by effectively connecting customers to desired agents who can resolve issues, concerns, and problems quickly.
It ensures that clients' issues are addressed and resolved through a first-call resolution without making another call again or keeping them on hold for longer.
When a customer support representative is unavailable, the call is effectively routed to the free agent, ensuring that incoming customer calls are answered immediately without any delay.
Effective call management
Call centers deal with a high volume of incoming and outgoing calls daily, which can be even more challenging during peak hours.
Call center software auto-routes calls, prioritizes emergency calls, attends calls quickly, redirects them to other channels, and pre-notifies customers about their queue position.
When dealing with high call traffic, Agents’ workloads are minimized by transferring incoming calls to the self-service options.
Real-time call data and insight
Sales teams and agents can utilize the call data and insight to identify the upselling and cross-selling opportunities and areas for improvement.
Agents can call back unanswered customer calls and catch them later, helping them make follow-up calls for potential lead generation. Based on data and insight, a sales team can close deals and offer upselling and cross-selling to existing customers.
CRM Integration
Call center software can integrate with other CRM platforms to enhance the workflow and productivity of the sales and support team.
Integrating the call center software with the customer relationship management system can help customer support agents and sales teams personalize customer conversation, support, cold-calling, sales pitches, and service.
Remote work capabilities
Cloud-based contact center solutions can facilitate your team members, agents, and customers with remote working options, allowing them to provide remote customer service.
Contact center software allows them to make and receive calls from anywhere, using internet-supported devices like smartphones, laptops, desktops, iPhones, etc. It ensures remote team collaboration and customer support are delivered to the customer without any issues.
Omnichannel customer support
Your valuable customers and prospects can be active on multiple communication channels. With the omnichannel call center tool, sales and front-line agents can connect with customers through their preferred communication channels, such as email, text messages, social media, and phone calls.
An omnichannel call center software maintains diversified customer interactions with low call volumes during peak hours across all channels.
12 Best Call Center Tools Your Sales And Support Team Must Have
1. Inbound Calling
Call centers receive incoming calls frequently, and such calls are made by the ideal customers, prospects, and existing customers to get your business's desired information, service, and customer support.
Inbound calls are essential; primarily, these calls are made by the people who are familiar with your business and offer to some level or want to know.
2. Outbound Calling
Call centers also make outgoing calls as required for cold calling, follow-up, feedback collection, surveys, and outbound marketing campaigns.
Sales agents and team members can utilize outbound calls to collect information and maximize reach.
Outbound calls are an effective way to connect with potential customers and generate leads through targeted campaigns.
3. Unified Callbox
Another call center tool your sales and support team needs is Unified Callbox. It centralizes all outbound calls, inbound calls, texts, voicemails, and emails in a single hub, allowing agents to categorize call data and logs effectively.
A unified callbox improves your call center’s performance and productivity by streamlining communication into a single dashboard, eliminating the need for manual work across multiple apps.
4. Call Recording
The call center tool automatically captures the audio of incoming and outgoing calls to reduce manual activity.
Sales agents and customer representatives can review these recorded call logs and listen to them to identify mistakes and improve their interactions in the future.
The sales and support team can listen to recorded calls to clear misunderstandings, resolve personal and legal disputes, and identify hot leads for selling opportunities.
5. CRM Integrations
CRM Integration is one of the underrated tools of call center software. Integrating the call center with CRM platforms can streamline the data exchange during an individual customer’s call.
Customer support agents and the sales team can utilize CRM data during calls to make personalized calls, maintain effective interactions, and provide quality service to the customer.
Contributing to positive customer experience and success in closing deals, upselling, and cross-selling opportunities.
6. Call History
Call history provides a detailed record of each call, including date, time, duration, destination, and status. Accessing this information through call center tools allows the sales and support team to view customer details, improve first-call resolution, and enhance customer interactions.
7. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
If the callers call during business hours, the ACD automatically routes calls to a suitable extension line and promptly connects with available agents. If agents are unavailable, callers are placed in the call queue extension until a free agent comes to attend the call.
8. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Setting up an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system ensures 24/7 customer support availability, directing callers to the proper departments or agents and resolving issues efficiently.
The IVR handles dynamic call volumes and adjusts to busy periods. Common queries or simple customer issues are directed to self-service options to find desired solutions independently, reducing the need for live agents.
9. Call Park or Call Queue
Call parking or queuing allows agents to handle multiple calls simultaneously. It will enable hold calls in a shared call zone, and any team member can attend those hold calls on their own extension or phone line.
It reduces the number of calls to voicemails, ensures all the calls are answered and connected with the available agents whenever possible, and minimizes caller wait times.
10. Call Routing
Call routing routes calls to the correct destination or extension line, helping customers resolve issues quickly by minimizing call wait times and improving customer experience.
It evenly distributes the incoming calls to all the available agents, reducing the individual agent workloads and ensuring all agents can attend the call and interact with the caller.
11. Ring Strategy
Ring strategy distributes incoming calls among the team members according to pre-set rules based on agent availability, agent skills, and the importance of the calls.
Ring strategy prioritizes high-profile calls based on their phone number and caller ID and connects them with the most appropriate agent to attend to them.
12. Call Analytics and Dashboard
Call analytics and dashboard tools enable team members to make data-driven decisions based on identified KPIs in real time and allow supervisors to monitor individual agent performance for improvements.
A simple dashboard and visual representation of call data allow your team members to navigate smoothly, enabling them to analyze and segment call data quickly in real-time.
Choose the Best Call center software for your business.
All the tools mentioned earlier can be found in a single call center solution - Calilio. Our call center software facilitates your business with robust VoIP features and call center tools, including IVR, ACD, call recording, call history, and call analytics.
Moreover, Calilio provides you with virtual phone numbers that you use to make calls over the internet, no matter where you are. With our call center solutions, you can share the same number among your team members agents. Sign up today to increase your team productivity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a call center tool?
A call center tool helps manage and optimize communication processes in call centers. It includes features like call routing, IVR, call recording, and customer interaction tracking to improve customer service and operational efficiency.
What equipment is used in a call center?
Call centers typically use equipment such as headsets, computers, phones (VoIP or traditional), automatic call distributors (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and software for managing calls, like CRM systems.
What are CRM tools in call centers?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools in call centers enable agents to access customer history, personalize conversations, manage leads, and track performance metrics for improved customer satisfaction and sales outcomes.
What software do most call centers use?
Most call centers use software like Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and VoIP-based call management tools. Calilio, Zendesk, and Salesforce, are among popular call center software for managing calls and customer data.
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