Contact Center Technology: From Must-Have to State-of-the-art

Busy contact centers handle millions of conversations across multiple channels each year. This means that any improvement that resolves calls faster, even if only by a second or two, can save thousands of hours each year – and that translates into improved customer service, lower costs and more efficient operations in assembly.

Below, we take a look at some of the technologies that can make this a reality. These essential, premium and cutting-edge contact center technologies can play a key role in optimizing your contact center both today and in the future.

Essential contact center technology

Let’s start by covering the standard capabilities that are required for a platform to work well for modern contact centers.

We’ll cover channels first, then look at capabilities.

Contact center channels

The ideal solution in terms of viability will support every channel you rely on now or plan to use in the near future. Most companies are looking for most, if not all, of the following contact center channels:

• Phone.
• Text.
• Chat.
• E-mail.
• Fax.
• Social networks.
• Video conference.
• Conference call.
• Public address systems.

Not everyone will care, but some contact center solutions don’t support faxing. There will be a curve during deployment. Others rely on third-party apps for specific channels. It may not be as efficient or as easy to secure as an embedded service.

If you want to buy or upgrade contact center softwarewhy not focus on providers with the infrastructure to support the channels you rely on?

For each channel, make sure the technology you’re relying on is supported. To make calls, for example, do you use a VoIP phone system, a local PBX or SIP trunk? Does the seller accept it today? Will it continue to work for the next few years?

Mandatory Contact Center Capabilities

I’ll admit, I’ve seen some of these capabilities listed as premium features by certain contact center vendors. Some people may disagree, but I believe all of this technology is critical to the success of a contact center:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration. helps businesses manage and track customer information in a unified and simplified location.
• Call waiting technology helps contact centers organize their incoming calls, simplifying the process to improve call resolution and reduce call waiting times.
• Call recording has many uses for contact centers, including training materials for new employees, resolving customer disputes, and providing opportunities to obtain useful information.
• Automated Call Distribution (ACD) systems. answer and direct calls to the specific agent best suited to solve a problem, reducing wait times, increasing efficiency and improving customer service.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a form of automated technology that allows incoming callers to get the information they need without having to speak to an actual agent, lessening the burden on them by reducing call volume and providing faster resolutions.
• Smart callback technology allows customers to hang up and be called back by an agent later so they don’t have to wait in a call queue, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and less hectic call volume for agents .

If the idea is to centralize communication across channels, CRM integration is a must, as is an embedded vendor-hosted IVR that can route calls across multiple channels.

Bundling other software and services is always possible, but it will slow down your deployment, migration, or day-to-day work.

SEE: Find out why a fully hosted IVR is better than managing your own.

Premium technology for contact centers

The following tools aren’t necessarily new or unusual – they just tend to be limited to premium subscriptions or available as add-on services.

In other words, you’re less likely to find these features bundled with basic contact center software. For the right use case, the premium cost translates into a healthy ROI.

Automated calls

Autodialers are a type of software that automatically dials outbound numbers for agents.

This technology is very useful as it increases the productivity and efficiency of the call agents as they do not have to do the manual work of dialing outbound numbers all day long.

There are several types of automatic dialersincluding progressive, predictive, preview, and agent-initiated versions. The best one for your business will depend on your business needs and the types of calls you tend to make. However, autodialers are most useful in situations where agents need to make a high volume of outbound calls throughout the day.

Call analysis

Call analytics technology is vital to better understand the customer journey, measure performance and gain insights into valuable metrics.

With a call analytics system, you can get a detailed look at KPIs such as call volume and resolution time. You can also view historical data, generate reports, and gather the information you need to make key decisions.

Adding analytics to the mix can be a great choice for businesses and organizations that want to gather more data quickly and efficiently, as well as those that want to optimize their call centers with data-driven decision making.

Contact Center Workforce Management (WFM)

Contact center workforce management (WFM) technology streamlines staffing and scheduling by using historical data to predict call volumes and optimize agent availability.

With minimal oversight, this technology automates tasks such as forecasting, shift allocation and real-time monitoring, ensuring the right number of agents are always available to meet customer demand. This reduces downtime, minimizes overload/underload and provides contact center managers with excellent visibility.

The key benefits of contact center workforce optimization include improved efficiency, lower operating costs and increased customer satisfaction. Accurate forecasting reduces wait times for customers while helping contact centers meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Email response management systems

Email response management systems collect, analyze and organize email requests sent by customers and then route them to the right team for an appropriate response.

This technology offers many benefits, such as faster email response times, improved customer satisfaction rates, and a more efficient email response process overall.

It works especially well for organizations and businesses that want to lighten the load on their agents – as well as those looking for small ways to improve their email response time, accuracy and quality of customer service.

Save your contact center agents from dealing with repetitive tasks like product returns, lost passwords, and the like. These workflows can be handled via email with minimal agent intervention.

State-of-the-art technology for contact centers

Finally, the following cutting-edge technologies can also play an important role in optimizing your call center. These are newer and more experimental technologies, some of which have improved drastically over the past few years.

While other parts of the market are still trying to figure out what to do with LLMs and machine learning, the use of AI in call centers is already having a major impact. It’s no different in contact centers, where these tools offer new advantages on multiple fronts.

Conversational AI

One of the newest and most powerful tools for optimizing a contact center is conversational AI, which is a type of technology that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand and simulate human conversation.

Keep in mind that this technology has been around for a while, but it’s gotten a lot better (and cheaper) in the past few years. Conversational IVR, for example, can simplify a caller’s journey by understanding and directing a complex request expressed in everyday language.

SEE: Discover more the proven benefits of conversational IVR.

There are also AI chatbots that can help route or triage incoming chats, start conversations with site traffic, and in some cases completely resolve customer inquiries.

The many advantages of conversational AI include lower costs, reduced response times, and improved customer satisfaction rates. Additionally, it can also reduce the burden on human employees, ultimately leading to less agent burnout and lower turnover.

Although chatbots are the most common form of conversational AI used in contact centers, other examples include voice assistants and full-fledged virtual agents.

Omnichannel support

Omnichannel contact centers support is a powerful tool for contact centers for many reasons, but the main reason is that it consolidates everything for agents in one place.

While multi-channel support is common across phone, video, chat, email, SMS, social media and the like, the problem is that it lacks integration – leading to confusion and inefficiency for both agents and customers.

Meanwhile, omnichannel support is able to connect all these communication channels together, leading to better customer support, reduced response times and improved results overall.

The distinction between omnichannel and multichannel is crucial for companies in retail, e-commerce, education and healthcare. These industries require consistent and integrated customer experiences across multiple platforms to handle high volumes of interactions and complex service needs.

Real-time transcription

Many contact centers can gain a serious competitive advantage with real-time transcription, which automatically transcribes voice and video calls into a text-based transcription format, giving agents and other stakeholders access to review calls.

You may see this feature labeled as Automatic Speech Recognition or ASR. Depending on the contact center software you use, you may be able to improve the accuracy of your ASR by training it in the jargon of your industry.

SEE: Learn about the most impressive ways ASR can help your call center.

This can help clear up post-call confusion, improve record-keeping, enable more accurate note-taking, and facilitate customer service. It’s usually a good investment for contact center operators who want to reduce errors and help make the customer journey smoother and more accurate for their agents.