Properly choose a cloud call center

There are various forms of cloud call center. Some of them are well-defined Call Center products with a high price. Others include a certain set of special features and do not exceed the cost of ordinary cloud VoIP products. Some are focused on large companies with a call center as a structural unit and with a specific set of services. Others serve small companies that simply put a lot of their employees on their phones so that they spend most of their time talking to customers. As you can see, choosing the right call center is far from easy.

Still, the effort is worth it. Call centers can provide companies with various ways to telephone communications with customers. And the number of such products based on cloud services is constantly growing, which makes them more affordable for small companies. Thus, using a suitable set of cloud call center options, a company becomes more efficient and competitive.

A call center can be used for sales, processing both incoming and outgoing calls, as well as for organizing various customer services. It provides several types of interrelated benefits, such as:
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• ensures that the call reaches the employee (call center operator) who is best equipped to handle it;
• increases the efficiency of call processing by employees;
• allows employees to interact more effectively with each other and provides great opportunities for solving various issues with customers;
• provides supervisors with comprehensive information on how employees handle calls, and allows you to intervene in the conversation, if necessary.

There are a number of call center features and functions that provide these benefits. Some of them are peculiar to call center, others - to applications. They include:

• Answering machines that greet the subscriber using a pre-recorded message and give them the opportunity to choose how to handle their call, either by pressing the keys on the phone or using voice commands.
• Automatic call distribution (ACD) automatically forwards the call to the necessary employee or operator based on either the subscriber number (if it is, say, a regular customer) or based on the answering machine’s choice and answers to the answering machine.
• Intelligent call routing, which, using call information and some criteria, is guaranteed to transfer the call to the operator who is most prepared to answer the client’s question. Criteria include the level of operator training (professional-oriented routing), the time zone in which the client is located, the history of the client's questions during his previous calls. Different priorities of different customers are also taken into account, based on factors such as the waiting time for the operator’s response and the potential benefit of interacting with the customer.
• A queue is a tool that prioritizes calls received by the operator from an answering machine, ACD, and in as a result of intelligent routing.
• Groups — enable the answering machine, ACD, router to transfer calls to teams, departments, and other subsets of employees, grouped by professional grounds.
• Monitor - allows the supervisor to listen to the conversation, prompt the operator so that the caller does not hear it, and also interferes with the conversation if necessary.
• Monitoring and documentation allows the supervisor to monitor the work of the operators, the status of the queue, to identify call center overloads. Monitoring usually provides real-time information in tabular or graphical form, and also documents the history of the call center for a certain period (hours, months, etc.).

Many suppliers provide this or that call center functionality, there are other differences in the delivered products. They include properties that increase the flexibility and usefulness of the product. A list of the most common and useful ones are listed below:

• Mobile access, which allows operators to answer business calls, including from mobile phones. This makes it easier to work remotely, say from home or from a branch, and also allows employees to be available for calls on trips or travels. In some cases, it may be calls from customers, in others - from operators who need urgent help when deciding a customer’s question or business matters.
• Information panel, accessible via the Internet or in another way. Provides a screen interface that facilitates the user to perform a variety of call processing operations. A user can, for example, click or drag the desired answer to a question with a mouse, put a call on hold or transfer it to another operator or employee (also using Drag & Drop). The operator can also see the status of other operators, groups, queue status. He can get information about the caller by dragging the call to the list of names, numbers and special icons. The dashboard can be loaded with a PC, smartphone app, or a web portal that provides similar functionality.
• Integration with unified communications (Unified Communications - UC). This property provides operators with a variety of ways to interact through an information panel and other methods. The most popular are instant messengers, chat rooms, video calls and conferences.
• Integration with CRM systems. Allows the operator to see the purchase history and other information about the caller. Customer information comes from a customer relationship management system (CRM), for example, Salesforce.com or SugarCRM, and call information comes from a cloud-based VoIP system. Information from CRM usually appears in a pop-up window when a call arrives and is based on information about the call (phone number, sections of the answering machine visited). The operator can also obtain information about the client manually by entering its identification data.

Adding new ways of communication turns VoIP into unified communications, and adding new ways of communicating to a call center turns it into a contact center. And this already allows the client, for example, to type a question in the chat window on the company's website or initiate a voice call by clicking the link (the operator can answer both from a regular phone or from a VoIP-connected phone) or start a video call from his browser.

There is a wide range of solutions on the cloud call centers market; each customer can choose the configuration according to his needs. It is also clear that when buying it is important to focus primarily on the company's own needs, and not on the supplier's offers.