Article

Choosing the Right Platform for your Contact Center: 9 Key Features

by Patrick Glynn

Contact center employees serve on the front lines of many businesses, handling customer complaints and troubleshooting issues, all while trying to deliver high-quality service.

To prevent customer service burnout, business leaders need to go the extra mile when it comes to helping representatives support themselves and other employees. But providing the digital tools they need to serve customers can be a challenge, especially given the number of options on the market.

To simplify the process of deciding what you need in contact center platforms, here’s a list of things you should keep in mind as you consider different options.

What is a contact center platform?

A contact center platform is a software solution that allows you to manage interactions with customers across a range of different communications channels. These may include voice, live chat, email, and social media.

What can a contact center platform do?

A contact center platform can automatically perform many of the more tedious or time-consuming tasks that employees typically have to tackle:

Routing calls to the appropriate recipient
Interactive voice response, which enables callers to navigate through pre-recorded messages that can help answer questions or solve problems
Workforce management, including scheduling contact center employees, and managing time off requests and breaks
Reporting on contact center statistics, like the number of calls handled during a certain period
Producing analytics of contact center data, which you can use to identify inefficiencies and improve processes

Your top priorities when selecting a contact center platform

At a high level, your contact center platform should make the lives of your employees and managers easier. But this breaks down into several functions you need to have in place for an effective solution.

Flexibility
Reporting and dashboarding
Scalability
Multi-channel support
Advance queuing capabilities
Callback request management
Agent assist
Call monitoring
Gamification

Flexibility

Flexibility in a contact center platform gives you the freedom to perform tasks such as adding new agents quickly, restructuring teams, and quickly adjusting your employees’ schedules. A flexible solution will also give you the power to add completely new communication channels.

For instance, suppose you discover that customers enjoy interacting with your company over social media, but your solution hasn’t yet incorporated that kind of channel. You’d want the flexibility to add social media interactions to your contact center schedule and a list of skills for employees to master.

Reporting

Reporting is a must-have for contact center software, but what sets a great platform apart from the rest is its customizable reporting and dashboarding capabilities.

A fully customized dashboard can provide you and your agents with tailored reports and dashboards that meet your specific needs and offer insights into key performance metrics and trends that matter most to your business.

Scalability

Scalable contact center platforms can grow—or shrink—as you need them to. For example, let’s say you need to hire temporary employees during peak seasons, like leading up to the holidays or after a product release, to better serve end users.

You’d want a contact center platform that makes it easy to add new employees or create new teams using your temporary hires.

Scalability in the context of contact center platforms also refers to the ability to add more locations. This would also include digital divisions staffed by people in a different country or those who are fluent in a target language.

Your solution should make it simple to incorporate additional divisions, as well as duplicate your existing digital infrastructure, to ease the learning curve for managers.

Support for multiple channels

Multi-channel support involves the ability of a platform to manage communications from different sources, such as voice calls, text messages, SMS, live chat, and more. This is a key component of making sure your contact center can serve as many customers as possible without forcing them to use a channel they’re not comfortable with.

Imagine if you had a contact center platform that could only manage phone calls, but customer feedback suggests that most people feel more comfortable using live chat to reach out.

It’s cost-effective, convenient, and each message gets encrypted. If your clientele was forced to reach out to you via only phone, they may be inconvenienced.

With multi-channel support, you can meet customers where they are by giving them the option of connecting when and how they’d like.

Advanced queuing capabilities

When it comes to queuing, your contact center platform should offer you a range of options. Here are a few that might work for your organization:

Hunt by 3s. With a hunt by 3s system, your platform identifies three agents that are available at any given moment. It then makes the next call available to all three of them. The first one that takes the call gets it.
Round robin. A round-robin configuration involves distributing calls to agents sequentially. In other words, the first call goes to agent one in the series, and then the second goes to agent two, the third to agent three, and so on. This ensures a fair balancing of call management.
Priority queuing. With priority queuing, you can prioritize certain callers. For example, the system may automatically put callers with certain issues ahead of others. You can also prioritize long-time customers or those that have paid for a specific support package.

Callback request management

With a callback feature, a customer can choose to get a call back instead of waiting on hold. This works for customers who have busy schedules, children, or who call while working. It frees them up from having to sit on the phone and allows them to focus on other activities.

Your call center platform should give customers this choice as well as automatically choose the agent or agents that’ll be offered the chance to call each customer back.

Agent Assist

Agent Assist is an AI-powered tool that helps customer service agents by providing real-time guidance, access to knowledge bases, and automated responses during customer interactions. With it, you can streamline customer interactions, improve response accuracy, reduce resolution times, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Call monitoring

If your platform has a call monitoring feature, managers, trainees, and others can listen in on live calls. This is particularly useful during the training process and when establishing best practices.

For example, if you have an especially skilled agent on your schedule, you can have a trainee monitor the call and take note of how the experienced agent handles objections, makes the customer feel comfortable, and chooses when and how to escalate calls to someone else.

Gamification

Gamification is a nice-to-have feature to consider when selecting a contact center platform.

Gamifying certain aspects of your call center operations can engage agents by turning daily tasks into challenges, incorporating rewards and recognition for achievements, and fostering a sense of competition that drives performance improvements. Integrating gamification into your platform can enhance employee satisfaction, boost productivity, and contribute to a positive work culture within your contact center.

This is especially beneficial in remote work settings, where employees may sometimes feel disconnected from each other.

Get Started on Optimizing your call center platform

Need help improving your contact center? Evergreen creates custom solutions to do just that. We build and manage high-performing teams for you, but we can also recommend the best platforms to suit your needs, or we can optimize what you already have so you can get the most out of your current technology stack.

Let us know where your organization has gaps, and we’ll reach out to discuss how we can move forward together.