7 Essential Software Integrations for Call Centers

Call centers can improve their operations and deliver superior customer service with powerful software integrations. These tools make it easier to streamline processes so that customers get the best possible experience from your team.

In today's fast-paced business environment, call centers play a crucial role in maintaining customer relationships and driving business growth. They are essential for most businesses as they handle many important customer-oriented tasks, such as responding to customer inquiries, collecting payments, and assisting sales teams. To stay competitive and deliver exceptional customer experiences, call centers must leverage the power of software integrations.

There are many software integrations available that allow businesses to manage customers efficiently and effectively. The features offered by such integrations include automated routing, real-time analytics, omnichannel interactions, and personalized customer journeys tailored to every user’s needs. With these integrations, businesses can streamline operations, improve agent productivity, and enhance overall customer satisfaction. In this article, we'll explore seven essential software integrations that every modern call center should consider implementing.

Why Software Integrations Matter for Call Centers

Before diving into specific integrations, it's important to understand why they are important for call center success. Software integrations allow different systems and applications to work together seamlessly, creating a unified ecosystem that enhances efficiency and effectiveness. For call centers, this means:

• Improved data flow and accessibility
• Reduced manual data entry and errors
• Enhanced agent productivity and performance
• Better customer insights and personalization
• Streamlined workflows and processes

Now, let's explore the seven essential software integrations that can transform your call center operations.

7 Essential Software Integrations for Modern Call Centers

Microsoft Teams

Leverage the capabilities of Microsoft Teams and enable your contact center to streamline operations, improve agent productivity, and enhance the overall customer experience. Integrating your call center with Microsoft Teams provides an effective way for organizations to interact with customers, both internally and externally, through its various communication modes like chat, video, and calls. Here is how a Microsoft Teams integration can benefit your organization:

• Enhanced customer experience: Customers can reach out to businesses through their preferred channel, whether it’s phone, web chat, email, or social media, and get consistent and personalized service. Customers can also use self-service options, such as chatbots, to receive answers to their inquiries quickly and conveniently
• Enable back-office users: Expand the call handling functionality to subject matter experts throughout the organization. Enable a more digitally agile workforce to perform a mix of customer engagement and traditional back-office tasks during the day.
• Streamlined processes: With a Microsoft Teams integration, call centers now have access to powerful collaboration tools. This type of integration eliminates the need to have multiple applications open at once, which streamlines the process for both support agents and IT teams.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a cloud-based software that provides digital workflow solutions for enterprise operations. ServiceNow can integrate with various third-party contact center solutions, including ice Contact Center, 8x8 and RingCentral, to enhance its functionality and provide a more comprehensive customer service platform.

• Enhance customer experiences: Agents gain access to comprehensive customer information, including call history, customer tickets, and other relevant data. This allows for more personalized and efficient service, leading to faster issue resolution and improved customer satisfaction.
• Save time by automating processes: Call centers can automate processes and reduce the amount of manual data entry with ServiceNow. Automating processes like lead scoring, ticket creation, and follow-up tasks can save agents time and help them manage their workload more efficiently.
• Enable agents to easily access unified data: Employees from all departments can share and utilize accurate customer information in one convenient location. This integration enables agents to quickly and easily access customer information like service history and contact information.

Tethr 

Tethr is a conversation intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and speech analytics to analyze customer interactions across various channels, including phone calls, chats, and emails. This integration helps businesses gain insights from customer conversations to improve customer experience, sales performance, and operational efficiency.

• Enable quick interaction analysis: Every conversation is analyzed, scored, and benchmarked against other companies based on millions of interactions. Easily identify bad experiences so you can focus on them for improvement. Identify your best conversations to learn from them and create best practices.
• Automate quality assurance evaluations: The platform automates call center QA by analyzing comprehensive call data rather than relying on sporadic manual evaluations. This provides a more accurate and complete picture of agent performance.
• Enhance agents' skills with performance insights: The platform analyzes agent performance data, including language use and handling of difficult calls. It provides insights that can be used to improve agents' skills and customer interactions.

Community Workforce Management Tool

CommunityWFM is a workforce management software solution specifically designed for call centers. It offers a simplified approach to workforce management, focusing on improving forecasting, scheduling, and overall operational efficiency.

• Ensure optimal staff allocation: CommunityWFM provides tools for accurate forecasting and schedule optimization to improve contact center efficiency. Managers will find the tools particularly useful for forecasting employee requirements accurately, making sure that there is adequate staff coverage at optimum times and locations.
• Meet expected demand and improve service levels: Contact center supervisors can instantly create agent schedules based on forecast results and desired service levels. Automatically track late arrival and sick time, as well as monitor expected and actual arrival times. CommunityWFM supports fixed and floating schedules, what-if scenarios, and split shifts.
• Gain valuable insights with advanced reporting: CommunityWFM offers advanced reporting and summary data that enables managers to monitor and analyze their agents’ adherence performance. Managers can store and report adherence data in perpetuity, quickly access large volumes of summary data, and choose from dozens of new reports that provide valuable insights into their workforce.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) solution that can be integrated with call centers to enhance customer service operations and streamline workflows. Here are some ways Dynamics 365 can revolutionize customer relations in call centers:

• Gain access to comprehensive customer profiles: Dynamics 365 can serve as a centralized database for customer information, allowing call center agents to access comprehensive customer profiles, including interaction history, preferences, and previous issues.
• Save time by populating fields automatically: Dynamics 365 offers a time-saving feature that can auto-populate fields in the CRM when a new interaction is initiated, sparing the agent from having to manually enter data.
• Personalize each customers’ interactions: With access to detailed customer data, agents can provide more personalized and efficient services, addressing callers by name and having immediate insight into their interaction history. Agents may also gain actionable insights from historical data that open up new marketing opportunities.

Microsoft PowerBI

Call centers can leverage Microsoft PowerBI to consolidate data from various sources to provide insights and analytics needed to make better decisions, streamline processes, and maximize efficiency. The integration helps call centers gain meaningful insights from their data which can be used to drive better business decisions and improve customer service operations.

• Unify insights from all data sources: Connect to different data sources, such as internal databases, spreadsheets, or APIs, and combine the data in one place with PowerBI. This enables you to easily create custom reports and dashboards that provide a complete picture of your data, including information from the call center.
• Transform call center data into meaningful visualizations: Call centers can use PowerBI to capture customer service data and turn it into meaningful visualizations. This enables them to identify trends in customer service interactions, such as high call volume at certain times of the day or the most frequent types of inquiries. This information can be used to adjust customer service or focus training efforts on particular areas.
• Agent performance monitoring: Detect language, extract key phrases, and score sentiment by leveraging PowerBI’s AI Insights to uncover areas for improvement and develop strategies for increasing customer satisfaction.

Salesforce

Salesforce is another powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform that can be incredibly beneficial for tracking data, improving customer service levels, and streamlining staff workflow.

• Enable quick access to customer information: Salesforce enables agents to quickly and easily access customer information like account history and contact information. This helps agents better serve customers by providing them with the information they need to resolve issues quickly and accurately.
• Tailor each interaction to their needs: Salesforce serves as a centralized database for customer information, allowing agents to access comprehensive customer profiles, including interaction history and preferences. By having access to all this data in one place, agents can provide a more personalized customer experience.
• Automate processes and save time: Salesforce integration can also help call centers automate processes and reduce the amount of manual data entry. Automated processes like lead scoring, automated ticket creation, and automated follow-up tasks can save agents time and help them manage their workload more efficiently.

Choosing the Right Integration for Your Call Center

Implementing the right software integrations can transform your call center into a highly efficient, customer-centric operation. With the help of software integrations for modern call centers, you can easily manage incoming calls, track customer data, and respond to inquiries quickly and efficiently.

As you explore these integrations, remember that the key to success lies in choosing solutions that align with your specific business needs and goals. With the right integrations in place, your call center will be well-equipped to meet the evolving demands of today's customers and stay ahead of the competition.

For more information on choosing the right integration for your call center, reach out to a ComputerTalk representative today.