What Is the Inbound Call Center Software?

Call center software differs based on many criteria, including the type of infrastructure, location – outsourced or your own call center, business model, and type of calls that are mainly processed by the call center software.

The final classification relates to the topic of our today’s article. There are two types of call centers that differ by the type of calls they process – inbound call center software and outbound. Let us deal with the definitions.

What Is Inbound Call Center Software?

Inbound call center software is a software tool that is designed to process inbound calls or incoming calls in other words. Inbound calls come from your customers, users, or just from people who are interested in your products or services. Basically, inbound calls are calls that come to you from all communication channels.

Why have we mentioned communication channels? Well, modern inbound call center software has to offer multichannel accessibility, which means that customers can reach out to you through different digital channels, including web chat, chatbots, emails, messengers, and finally phone calls.

Where Is the Inbound Call Center Software Used?

Inbound call center software is mostly used for providing customer services across all industries, which means there are no limits to using inbound call center solutions, no matter what is the niche of your business. Inbound call center software tools are used in e-commerce, healthcare, car dealerships, insurance companies, financial industries, real estate businesses, government institutions, educational institutions, and so on.

Modern inbound call center software is much more capable than outdated PBX systems or CRM software tools with telephony integrations. Why is it so? First of all, inbound call center software gathers numerous features that are unavailable in the above-mentioned solutions. Secondly, inbound call center software has powerful third-party software integration capabilities thanks to advanced API. Finally, cloud-based inbound call center software solutions can be scaled up without any effort as your business is scaling up – this is vital for companies that are looking for fast scale-up and development, and those that are entering new markets and tackling new challenges.

So what are the features of inbound call center software?

Inbound Call Center Software Features

Call Monitoring

Call monitoring is a very important feature if you want to do quality assurance concerning your call center agents performance and efficiency. It works in three different modes – whispering, hidden mode, and barging-in. Whispering mode is called so because this mode allows agents to hear your advice during real-time calls with customers. Hidden mode allows you to listen to live calls, and neither customer nor the agent will hear you. Barging-in mode allows you to join the conversation as its third participant.

Call Recording

Call recording is also a vital feature because it is very useful for call center agents training and quality assurance, too. You can use recordings of customer calls for one-to-one training sessions or as examples of good or bad customer service for the onboarding process for new hires.

Intelligent Call Routing

This is definitely the most important feature you require for providing an excellent customer service experience for your customers. What does it mean and how does it work? First of all, call routing is the process of connecting an inbound caller to an agent, which means it has to work in accordance with a pre-set algorithm. Basically, you can just set up an algorithm for connecting inbound callers to the first free operator, but will it be efficient for complicated cases? Surely no. Intelligent call routing means that the inbound call center software recognizes the nature of customer requests and uses other customer data such as customer status, previous purchases, customer history, and so on for choosing the most appropriate agent for this customer to decrease issue resolution time and boost customer satisfaction.

For instance, callers who want refunds will be not only linked to your financial or sales department but the agent who has the most relevant experience in dealing with such issues.

Third-Party Software Integration

For providing excellent customer service and building customer retention, you need much more than just call center software, and modern solutions are the solutions that can cover all your needs and business requirements. You can integrate such vital tools as CRM systems, help desk software, and payment services with your inbound call center software via API. It will allow you to not only provide better customer service but create a customer service personalization strategy.

IVR Software

An interactive voice response system (IVR) is a very important tool that can move your customer service strategy to another level as it is beneficial in a few fields of your call center operations. First of all, it is a very capable self-service tool – it can service your customers 24/7 because of its design and ability to answer many customer questions, not only elementary questions. Customers just need to choose the menu section of the IVR software that meets their request and get all the needed information and support. Moreover, modern IVR solutions can even recognize the human language.

Secondly, IVR is very important for intelligent call routing. During interaction with the IVR software, the system gathers information about customer requests and sends it to another vital tool – the automatic call distributor (ACD), that performs call routing. The information gathered by IVR is used for choosing the most relevant agent for each exact customer.

Finally, IVR software is a perfect call queue management solution. You can remind customers about the estimated wait time in the queue, inform them about their position in the queue, and offer callback services for those customers who don’t have time for waiting.

Real Time Dashboards

What do you need to enhance your customer service? Data and insights to understand customer expectations, imperfections in your call center performance, problems with staff, and information about all of the call center operations and processes. Without data, you can’t make thoughtful decisions, and that’s why inbound call center software provides you with real-time dashboards that contain all the needed data for proper call center functioning, and the decision-making process to make sure that you will know everything you have to know.