Contact Center Technology: From Must-Have to Cutting-Edge

Busy contact centers handle millions of conversations across multiple channels each year. This means any improvement that resolves calls quicker, even if only by a second or two, can result in thousands of hours saved each year — and that translates into improved customer services, lower costs, and more efficient operations overall.

Below, we’ll take a look at some of the technologies that can make this a reality. These essential, premium, and cutting-edge contact center technologies can play a key role in the optimization of your contact center both today and in the future.

Essential contact center technology

Let’s start by covering the standard, must-have capabilities for a platform to work well for modern contact centers.

First we’ll cover channels, then we’ll look at capabilities.

Contact center channels

The ideal solution in terms of viability will support every channel you rely on now, or plan on using in the near-future. Most businesses are looking for most, if not all, of the the following contact center channels:

• Phone.
• Text.
• Chat.
• Email.
• Fax.
• Social media.
• Videoconferencing.
• Conference calling.
• Public address systems.

Not everyone will care, but some contact center solutions do not support fax. That’s going to be a curveball during deployment. Others rely on third-party apps for certain channels. That might not be as efficient or as easy to secure as a built-in service.

If you are looking to purchase or upgrade your contact center software, why not focus on vendors with the infrastructure to support the channels you rely on?

For each channel, make sure the specific tech you rely on is supported. To make calls, for example, are you using a VoIP phone system, an on-premise PBX, or SIP Trunk? Does the vendor support it today? Will it continue to work in the next few years?

Must-have contact center capabilities

I’ll admit, I have seen some of these capabilities listed as premium features by certain contact center providers. Some people may not agree, but I consider all of this technology essential for the success of a contact center:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) integration helps businesses manage and track customer information in one unified and streamlined location.
• Call queuing technology helps contact centers organize their incoming calls, simplifying the process of improving call resolutions and cutting down on call wait times.
• Call recording has many uses for contact centers, including training material for new hires, dispute resolution with customers, and providing opportunities to gain useful insights.
• Automatic call distributor (ACD) systems answer and route calls to the specific agent who is best suited to resolve an issue, cutting down on wait times, boosting efficiency, and improving customer service.
• Interactive voice response (IVR) is a form of automated technology that lets incoming callers get the information they need without having to talk to an actual agent, lessening the burden they have by reducing call volumes and providing faster resolutions.
• Intelligent callback technology allows customers to hang up and be called back by an agent later on so they don’t have to wait in a call queue, leading to improved customer satisfaction and a less hectic call volume for agents.

If the idea is to centralize communication across channels, CRM integration is a must-have, as is a built-in IVR hosted by the vendor that can route calls across multiple channels.

Tying in other software and services is always possible, but it’s going to slow down your deployment, migration, or day-to-day work.

SEE: Discover why a fully hosted IVR is better than managing your own. 

Premium contact center technology

The following tools are not necessarily new or uncommon — they simply tend to be limited to premium subscriptions or available as add-on services.

In other words, you are less likely to find these features bundled with basic contact center software. For the right use-case, the premium cost translates into healthy ROI.

Auto dialers

Auto dialers are a type of software that automatically dials outbound numbers for agents.

This technology is very useful since it boosts productivity and efficiency for call agents, as they don’t have to do the manual grunt work of dialing outbound numbers all day long.

There are several types of auto dialers, including progressive, predictive, preview, and agent-initiated versions. The best one for your business will depend on your business needs and the kinds of calls you tend to make. In any case, auto dialers are most useful in situations where agents need to make a high volume of outbound calls throughout the day.

Call analytics

Call analytics technology is vital for having a better understanding of the customer journey, gauging performance, and obtaining insights into valuable metrics.

With a call analytics system, you can gain a detailed look into KPIs such as call volume and resolution time. You can also view historical data, generate reports, and gather information necessary to make key decisions.

Adding analytics to the mix can be a great choice for businesses and organizations looking to gather more data quickly and efficiently, as well as those looking to optimize their call centers with data-backed decision-making.

Contact center workforce management (WFM)

Workforce management (WFM) technology in contact centers streamlines staffing and scheduling by using historical data to predict call volumes and optimize agent availability.

With minimal oversight, this tech automates tasks like forecasting, shift assignments, and real-time monitoring, ensuring the right number of agents are always available to handle customer demand. This reduces idle time, minimizes overstaffing/understaffing, and gives contact center managers excellent visibility.

The key benefits of contact center workforce optimization include improved efficiency, lower operational costs, and enhanced customer satisfaction. Accurate forecasting reduces wait times for customers while helping contact centers meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Email response management systems

Email response management systems gather, analyze, and organize email inquiries submitted by customers and then route them to the right team for an appropriate response.

This technology offers many benefits, such as faster email response times, improved customer satisfaction rates, and a more streamlined email response process overall.

It works especially well for organizations and businesses looking to lighten the load for their agents — as well as those looking for small ways to improve their email response times, accuracy, and customer service quality.

Rescue your contact center agents from dealing with repetitive tasks like product returns, lost passwords, and requests of that nature. Those workflows can be handled via email with minimal agent intervention.

Cutting-edge contact center technology

Finally, the following cutting-edge technologies can also play an important role in optimizing your call center. These are newer and more experimental technologies, some of which have improved drastically in the last several years.

While other parts of the market are still trying to figure out what to do with LLMs and machine learning, the use of AI in call centers is already having a major impact. It’s not different in contact centers, where these tools are providing fresh advantages on multiple fronts.

Conversational AI

One of the newest and most powerful tools for optimizing a contact center is conversational AI, which is a type of technology that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand and simulate human conversation.

Note that this technology has been around for a little while, but it’s gotten so much better (and cheaper) in the last few years. Conversational IVR, for example, can simplify the route a caller needs to take by understanding and routing a complex request stated in everyday language.

SEE: Discover more proven benefits of conversational IVR. 

There are also AI chatbots that can help route or triage incoming chats, start conversations with website traffic, and, in some cases, completely resolve customer requests.

Conversational AI’s many advantages include lower costs, reduced response times, and improved customer satisfaction rates. Furthermore, it can also reduce the burden on human employees, ultimately leading to less agent burnout and turnover.

Although chatbots are the most common form of conversational AI used in contact centers, other examples include voice assistants and full-fledged virtual agents.

Omnichannel support

Omnichannel contact centers support is a powerful tool for contact centers for many reasons, but the main reason is that it consolidates everything for agents in one single place.

While multichannel support is common for phone, video, chat, email, SMS, social media, and the like, the problem is that it lacks integration — leading to confusion and inefficiency for both agents and customers.

Meanwhile, omnichannel support is able to link all of these communication channels together seamlessly, leading to better customer support, reduced response times, and improved outcomes overall.

The distinction between omnichannel and multichannel is crucial for businesses in retail, ecommerce, education, and healthcare. These industries require consistent, integrated customer experiences across multiple platforms to handle high volumes of interactions and complex service needs.

Real-time transcription

Many contact centers can gain a serious competitive edge with real-time transcription, which automatically transcribes voice and video calls into a text-based transcript format, giving agents and other stakeholders access to calls for review.

You may see this feature labeled as Automated Speech Recognition, or ASR. Depending on the contact center software you use, it’s possible to improve ASR accuracy by training it on the jargon of your industry.

SEE: Learn about the most impressive ways ASR can help your call center. 

This can help clear up post-call confusion, improve record-keeping, enable more accurate note-taking, and make customer service more seamless overall. It’s typically a good investment for contact center operators looking to reduce errors and help make the customer journey more seamless and accurate for their agents.