Integrating your call center with powerful tools

If you run a call center, you probably know how difficult it is to choose the right tools for your team. Sadly, a single best solution doesn’t exist — but tool integration can easily work wonders. Here’s how to integrate your call center with powerful tools.

Customer support and sales form the backbone of every organization. No wonder — constantly acquiring new customers and retaining the existing ones is essentially what every business should strive for. Interestingly enough, the majority of consumers prefers interacting with a human instead of a chatbot or digital self-service, which is why call centers are still invaluable up to date. It might be difficult to serve everyone properly if you’re not using any dedicated software, though.

The importance of tool integration

Businesses have a range of applications at their disposal nowadays, but they are often on the lookout for a single best tool that would allow them to do everything at once. Sadly, a perfect “all-in-one” solution doesn’t exist — but it’s quite common to use multiple tools instead.

At the same time, it’s tool integration that can actually work wonders for your business. It’s basically the ability of different applications to communicate and exchange data with one another. This way, there’s no need to switch between the systems: you can leverage all the benefits of your software, and keep everything in one place once you’re at it.

Because of it, there’s no need to look for a single best solution endlessly — in fact, integration makes it possible to discover a lot of new opportunities, automate certain tasks, and unify business processes. This, in turn, brings the best out of your software and affects the quality of customer & sales support.

Why exactly should you integrate your tools?

• To improve the workflow. Ineffective processes can easily lead to chaos, which affects the productivity of your team and time needed to both take the call and resolve the issue at hand. Then, the more your customers wait for their call to be answered and their problem to be solved, the more willing they are to stop reaching out and switch to a competitor instead. It matters, then, how you set the workflow and what software you are going to use in order to improve it;
• To have all the necessary information at hand. When striving to improve the quality of customers & sales support, it’s important to provide your team with all the information and tools needed to perform their jobs. It can make a huge difference for your team, as well as your customers — especially since the majority of them expects the agent to know who they are and what were their previous engagements with your company. This, however, wouldn’t be possible without the use of powerful tools and their integration;
• To analyze the performance of your call center. If you monitor the incoming calls, you can not only have some insights on your team’s productivity but also on your customer’s activity. In fact, the more you know about your customers and their needs, the better you can serve them — which is why your team should not only have all the information handy but be able to draw conclusions from it. Yet again, this proves to be much easier to do with integrated tools.

Choose to integrate the right tools

There’s no doubt that your team should be equipped with the right tools in order to deliver seamless customer & sales support. What’s more, you should be able to integrate all these tools with one another — only then you can truly take advantage of the software you have in place. Here are the absolute essentials for your team:

• Powerful call center solution. CloudTalk, for example, will not only let you make and receive calls but also have complex dashboards and statistics on calls, agents and call queues — all in one place. You can leverage these insights to identify the average speed of answer and optimal times to reach out to customers, just to name a few. This, in turn, will make it possible to streamline business processes and improve the quality of your service. These are not the only features of CloudTalk you can make good use of — check out all of its capabilities to get the full picture.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. The main purpose of a CRM is to organize and manage all customer information, activities and conversations, which helps to understand and serve them better. Such tools are often necessary, especially when it comes to sales activities — and their seamless integration with a call center solution can make a huge difference for the agents. Take CloudTalk-Pipedrive integration as an example. By integrating your call center with a proper CRM, you can easily automate “manual tasks”, have all the important details in one place (and synchronized in real time), and make calls directly from Pipedrive, which should boost the performance of your team and speed up the whole sales process. Not to mention that you can deliver context-based, personalized services to your customers.
• Helpdesk tool. When trying to offer outstanding customer support, the speed and quality of query resolutions are extremely important. That’s precisely why every call center should also have a helpdesk tool at their disposal — mostly to have all details about the customers and queries raised by them via various channels. Customer support tools, such as Salesforce, Help Scout, LiveAgent or Freshdesk can easily provide your team with a detailed overview of all clients and their requests, and enable your team to answer them as fast (and as good) as possible.
• Live chat. In today’s customer-centric and hyper-connected world, customers use different channels to get in touch. They also expect a quick, contextual response, irrespective of the communication channel. This can only be achieved through omnichannel support, managed with a proper tool that makes it possible to see all the information on a single dashboard. By integrating LiveChat with CloudTalk, you give your customers a chance to quickly and easily contact you through a live chat, while all your agents get access to chat history in one place.

Connect CloudTalk with your favorite business tools

Similarly to most companies, you might already be storing customer data in your CRM, help desk tools, and other solutions. Why not have all of them integrated? This way, there’s no need to search for information in multiple systems. Your team has everything displayed in one place and knows exactly who’s calling instead, even before picking up the call.

If you’re thinking of equipping your team with the right tools, you should definitely give CloudTalk a try. The software will easily let you take advantage of powerful and easy one-click integrations — this, in turn, will make your data synchronised and available at all times to have more productive conversations with your customers and prospects. And the best part? You can start using it all in less than 5 minutes, without an actual setup or installation fees. Use your free trial now.

Originally published at https://www.cloudtalk.io on July 10, 2019.