Enterprise contact center solutions

You’re probably already familiar with the traditional model of a call center team—it’s that loud, large office with rows and rows of agents wearing headsets and handling a large call volume of inbound calls and outbound calls.

An enterprise cloud contact center software lets these agents manage all those phone emails—in addition to other communication channels like live chat messages, emails, and more—in one place. And today, one of the big advantages of this software is that it allows agents to work remotely, meaning businesses can save a hefty amount on leasing or owning that office space.

Typically, enterprise call center or contact center software includes features like a power dialer or predictive dialing (for outbound-focused teams), omnichannel communications, and monthly or annual SaaS (Software as a Service) pricing plans.

Traditionally, global organizations used on-premises contact center platforms, which required hardware and server closets—which meant that they needed the office space to hold all this equipment.

Today, sales teams and support teams can work from home or anywhere in the world, with a good contact center platform. Supervisors can monitor customer satisfaction, ensure quality management, and more, virtually.

There are a few common “types” of enterprise contact center software. Here are the key ones.

On-premises platforms are stored and typically also managed in-house by your own IT team or a third party provider. Historically, organizations have preferred this type of enterprise contact center software because they can have total control over every single detail, but it requires a huge initial investment and can be harder to customize or to add integrations to.

Then there are hosted or cloud-based “CCaaS” solutions which typically let you access all the functionality through a desktop or mobile app. These are more modern types of software solutions, and will usually give you everything you need for an omnichannel contact center. They also tend to be more cost-effective because all upgrades and maintenance are carried out by your provider.

Particularly over the last decade, we’ve seen a massive change when it comes to both technology and what customers expect from companies.

For one, customer support is now an omnichannel experience. Customers no longer want to only communicate by phone and a key part of an organization’s digital transformation is being able to offer those alternative ways of communicating, whether that’s through messaging or SMS/MMS or other methods.

For large organizations in particular, upgrading your telephony or call center software can be a lengthy process. Not only do you have to choose a good provider, but there are also other things to keep in mind, such as how you’ll transfer data and contacts over from your current provider, how daily operations and tasks (like setting up new agents remotely or managing phone numbers) will work.

You have to consider the customer experience for not only your customers, but also your own teams as they use that contact center solution. Make sure to test-drive and try all these things, in addition to any business- or industry-specific requirements during any free trials or product demos as you’re vetting providers.

Often, you’ll see “scalability” or some mention of ease of scaling as you research contact center software. Essentially, this means things like “can you add new agents to the system, and set them up with accounts and phone numbers, and adjust their settings or add them to different contact center groups or teams easily?”

More importantly, this also includes scaling down. Some platforms make it easy to keep adding new agents and scale up, sure—but very few enterprise contact center solutions also make it easy to remove agents and scale back down when, say, the high season for your industry is over for the year. Keep this step in mind!

The customer experience is always going to be one of the most important considerations. When your customers try to reach your business, can they do that easily? When they get transferred from one agent to another, do they have to keep repeating their reasons for calling (or can the agents share that information with each other behind the scenes)?

Seemingly simple things like this aren’t always designed into the workflows for every enterprise call center solution, so make sure you’re aware of your specific customer and business needs. Finally, make sure you have a list of your “must-have” integrations. If there are essential tools, like your CRM for instance, that are crucial to your everyday business workflows, then your contact center solution should integrate with them!