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8 Tools for Hosted Call Center Excellence

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The positive customer experience – it’s something every call center should strive to achieve. But when channels are clogged with too many contacts or the contact and the agent cannot understand each other, quality customer care starts to fall short. Fortunately, the hosted call center space can benefit from a number of tools to ensure positive customer experiences.

A recent Enterprise Apps Today report highlighted eight applications available for the hosted call center that can enable a customer service organization to keep their sites set firmly on customer care. These eight tools, in no particular order, focus on both voice and online care.

Need recording to effectively train hosted call center staff? CallCopy (News - Alert) has an app for that. The company’s cc: Voice is easily configured and compatible with various systems, including VoIP, blended and TDM environments. Priority-based scheduling and archiving is available, as well as advanced search and synchronized screen capture.

Do agents continue to encounter customers who cannot speak their language? Headlines tend to focus on offshore agents who can’t speak the language, when challenges often arise for the U.S.-based agent encountering the customer whose first language is not English.

Fortunately, Lionbridge offers Help Desk Outsourcing, providing organizations with the necessary technology to support real-time translations. eLearning and documentation services are also available for the hosted call center environment.

When potential or current customers visit your website, you want to be sure they can find the information they need, or instantly connect to someone who can help. BoldChat enables your hosted call center agents to quickly engage visitors, providing instant access to customer service and support.

Do you need a multi-channel approach to customer care? LivePerson (News - Alert) offers a cloud-based approach to enable the hosted call center to proactively connect with customers in real-time, leveraging chat, content delivery and voice services through the website, social media platforms or over mobile devices. Multiple customers are easily handled at once with LP Chat and LP Voice. Fonality (News - Alert) Heads Up Display (HUD) provides Unified Communications in a cloud-based business phone system. The hosted call center environment can benefit from unified messaging, conference bridges, voice, chat, e-mail, presence management, call center applications and even integration with platforms like Google, Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook and Salesforce.

Automate business processes and improve customer support with the implementation of self-help portals and social media monitoring. VContactCenter enables the hosted call center to create separate business process management portals, workflows and entitlement paths. Multi-channel operations are readily supported to streamline customer care responses regardless of the channel. Plus, the reporting capabilities in this application provide valuable insight into sales performance.

Measure hosted call center performance and compliance with NICE Systems, distributed through Jenne Inc. Capture, manage and process calls in branches or standalone offices with the NICE Recording eXpress. The NICE Quality eXpress enables the call center to better understand customer intent and gain insights into agent performance.

For the hosted call center that needs to take calls from anywhere in the world, Virtual PBX (News - Alert) Complete with VoIP Anywhere could be the answer. The application allows calls from any high-speed connection, while enabling smaller businesses to leverage the work-from-home agent.

While the hosted call center can benefit from a variety of solutions in the market, the eight tools listed here are a great place to start.