Call Recording Featured Article

Contact center software has changed over the years for the same reason any technology evolves: In reaction to customer needs. For most contact centers, in fact, little would change if the customers’ needs and expectations didn’t change first. As such, many contact centers today now leverage a standard set of advanced technologies, usually as one workforce optimization (WFO) suite.

However, as Scott Sachs of SJS Solutions recently pointed out in an article for TechTarget, the need to keep pace with customer expectations leads contact centers to evaluate their technologies and make difficult decisions about investments they’ve used for years. After all, most contact centers have invested a lot of capital to acquire the set of technologies they currently have. This makes it difficult to justify additional IT investments.

Fortunately, cloud technologies can help to ease some of this difficulty by eliminating the upfront investment of on-premises software. Whether your company is willing to spend the extra cash for an upgrade or not, there’s an argument to be made that certain tools are indispensable in the modern contact center.

These tools include workforce management software, an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), call recording, desktop systems, and knowledge management.

First and foremost, though, a solid WFO suite is the essential jumping off point for contact centers. That’s because WFO offers a broad suite of modules that include some or all of the above, including workforce management for staff scheduling, quality monitoring, call recording, e-learning, performance management and more. In addition, a good WFO suite is about improving the efficiency and effectiveness of call center agents beyond even attaining service-level goals. This, in turn, means greater revenue production and cost savings from the contact center, making it easier to justify further expenses.

Using WFO as a jumping off point, a contact center should then consider an ACD with multichannel capabilities and IVR to make the incoming flow of calls more manageable. Build from there to meet your day-to-day contact center needs and address problems as they arise.