The 7 Best Contact Center Operations Software for 2022 and Beyond

All businesses know the value of providing customer support. But over the years, the way they provide this support has changed. A few decades ago, most businesses managed customer queries or complaints via phone, or in person. In the late 90s and early 2000s, voice-based contact centers’ advent led to the customer support function’s upgrade. Today, omnichannel contact centers are the norm in order to satisfy changing customer expectations. This is why contact centers need to be agile and consistently focused on delivering great Customer Experiences (CX). And world-class contact center operations software is at the heart of these goals.

Such solutions can help the organization take, make, route, monitor, and review calls, and deliver support via non-voice channels like email, social media, SMS, and even AI-powered live chat. They can also provide self-service options to those customers who prefer it. With analytics and reporting capabilities, they can review their performance in terms of CX, customer satisfaction, first call resolution (FCR), average handling time (AHT), etc., and do what’s required to fill any gaps. With optimization features, they can analyze and track agent performance and take steps to maximize their productivity, efficiency, and profitability. Such software can also help them connect various business systems like CRM platforms so agents can quickly access customer data histories, deliver personalized, timely, and data-driven customer interactions, and ultimately help improve business outcomes.

Contact center operations software comes in two main forms: on-premise and cloud-based. The former – with roots in traditional “landline” telephony and hardware – is best for voice-based contact centers. Although highly customizable, such solutions incur upgrade and maintenance expenses every few years. Cloud-based solutions – also known as contact center as a service (CCaaS) – are ideal in omnichannel settings. Easily accessible from anywhere, they offer the benefit of lower costs and easy management, plus enhanced scalability, flexibility, and security.

Here is our Top 7 list of the best contact center operations software for 2022!

#1. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE)

The Cisco UCCE platform can support up to 24,000 agents in delivering proactive and personalized customer experiences. Interrupted operations are vital for contact centers, particularly in a post-COVID world. This solution ensures such continuity with built-in fault tolerance. Its single intuitive agent desktop includes inbound voice, outbound voice, outbound IVR, and digital channels for seamless omnichannel interactions.

Using its NLP-powered IVR capability, contact centers can effectively capture customer intent and handle their requests accurately, and thus improving their self-service experience. Its powerful reporting capabilities provide key insights into customer experience and also enable supervisors to monitor agent performance and identify gaps and improvement areas. Cisco UCCE also provides call routing, a script editor, and a management portal for customer profile creation and segmentation.

Enhance the performance of your Cisco UCCE contact center with the Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop from NovelVox. With this solution, you can seamlessly integrate all your third-party applications including CRM, ticketing, and EMR/EHR platforms with your Cisco contact center. This provides agents with a 360° view of their customers – a vital benefit that can empower them to provide enhanced CX while improving FCR and decreasing AHT.

#2. Agent Accelerator

In virtually every omnichannel contact center, agents use a dozen or more applications every day, such as CRM, FAQ or knowledgebase search, billing systems, phone/ACD login, live chat, etc. But when they have to work with multiple applications on a complex desktop with a confusing interface, their workflow becomes very complicated, which hampers their ability to quickly resolve customers’ issues. Often, they have to jump from screen to screen to find the right information to support callers. This makes navigation difficult and robs them of time, which means that service quality suffers, queues become longer, and handling time per caller goes up. Ultimately, inefficiencies and escalations increase, FCR and CSAT fall, and contact center performance deteriorate.

A Unified Agent Desktop with a clean, consolidated view and simple integrations to 3rd-party applications provides an effective solution to avoid these issues. It simplifies agents’ customer interaction journey and enables them to quickly access relevant customer information. They can get a detailed view of the customer lifecycle so they can deliver prompt, effective, and personalized customer service to every caller. It provides easy and near-instant access to all the information and context they need with CRM, ticketing, and other back-office integration, so they can nurture and develop customer relationships, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. They can also handle more calls in a day, and improve the quality of each call. The all-in-one desktop also reduces training times and errors, lowers AHT, and improves FCR.

Designed for Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys contact centers, the NovelVox range of Unified Agent Desktops enable agents to quickly access required information so they can anticipate customer needs, make better decisions, and deliver enhanced experiences with each interaction. Each desktop comes with pre-built gadgets so agents can focus on the customer and not get distracted by the workflow. Moreover, it can be optimized to adapt to the specific business needs of any contact center.

#3. Wallboards

Wallboard is a proven way to help agents consistently maintain high performance – not to mention high spirits! This powerful visual communication aid gives supervisors, team leaders, and managers a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on the floor, and if any gaps need to be addressed. They can quickly view up-to-date performance data, and communicate this information to agents, so they know exactly how they’re doing and where they need to improve. A well-designed and people-friendly wallboard can also help make the workplace highly engaging, which can further boost agent performance and productivity.

With a contact center wallboard like the iVision Plus from NovelVox, supervisors can continuously measure, capture, and display vital metrics, targets, and progress reports. Such up-to-date information in a non-partisan, unambiguous format can improve agent engagement, boost productivity, and lower stress in a highly dynamic environment. These wallboards also help create a “culture of collaboration and shared goals”, where the entire team works together to achieve the organization’s KPIs and drive its success by improving FCR, lowering AHT, and boosting CSAT and CX.

#4. Agent Scripting Tool

In an omnichannel contact center setup, an effective agent script can unify the team and improve its effectiveness. It ensures that only accurate, up-to-date, company-approved information is shared with customers. It also helps safeguard the organization from legal and compliance issues. Fortunately, modern contact centers no longer have to create such scripts manually.

With a call center agent scripting tool from NovelVox, supervisors, and managers can quickly create, modify, test, and deploy scripts with advanced objection handling and guided workflows. They can visually design the complete business workflow logic, and ensure that the support workflow adheres to this logic. This innovative offering assists agents at every step of customer support, which can help improve the contact center’s KPIs such as CSAT and AHT – even with a remote team. It can also improve FCR by 45% and save up to 50% of Level 1 call escalations. The tool also drastically reduces agent training time so new agents can get to work faster. Other world-class features such as a built-in rules engine, activity logs, and answer history, seamless third-party integration, and script reporting enable supervisors to control – and even improve – service delivery, and ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

#5. CRM Integration

A CRM platform is a rich goldmine of customer information – who they are, what they do, how to contact them, and more. It compiles relevant information including demographic details, contact details, buying history, call logs, chat transcripts, etc. A CRM can also provide relevant context for each transaction, and reveal key trends and patterns. By tapping into all this information at a granular level, agents can get a 360° view of every customer so they can tailor their communication strategies, and provide the best service and experiences through the right channel and at the right time. By integrating and synchronizing the CRM with the contact center platform, the organization can streamline customer communications and enhance customer experiences, even in a remote setting. When many agents work from home, it’s easy to miss important customer information, which often leads to missed requests, long wait times, and poor-quality service. This can frustrate customers and even lead to increased churn. A CRM platform can help fill these gaps with timely, relevant, and contextual data, so agents can understand customers better, and deliver excellent service quality with every interaction.

With a CRM-integrated agent desktop such as the Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop with Salesforce or the Avaya Agent Desktop with Salesforce, agents have all the contextual data they need to quickly address customer queries. Moreover, this information is available on the same interface/screen they use to communicate, so they don’t have to waste time switching screens or struggling with a complicated workflow. Interactions are also smoother, which can improve CSAT, CX, and FCR. NovelVox also provides advanced integration solutions for Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys contact centers whose CRM of choice is Microsoft Dynamics. With these integrations, they have all the advanced functionalities they need to offer enhanced customer experiences and boost their brand value.

#6. Supervisor Desktop

For many customers, the customer service agent is their first point of contact with a firm, which is why it’s critical to manage their productivity and maintain high-quality standards. With a Supervisor Desktop, team leaders and managers can support their agents’ productivity and efficiency goals with real-time data and statistics. It provides a single interface so supervisors don’t have to toggle between multiple applications or gadgets to monitor their team’s performance, view queue summaries, or take actions related to reskilling or performance optimization. The device integrates with third-party applications like workforce management, call loggers, and quality monitoring tools, and provides everything supervisors need to motivate agents and encourage them to deliver consistently excellent results.

With the Cisco Finesse Supervisor Desktop from NovelVox, supervisors can boost their agents’ productivity and efficiency with timely, relevant, and up-to-date information. An all-in-one, intuitive interface eliminates the need to alt-tab between screens. All the information they need about their team or customers is easily available so they can focus on what really matters – monitoring their remote agents’ performance in real time. They can drop in on live calls, assist agents with the next actionable, and even alter the agent’s state to reduce customer hold/wait times. They can also decide if they need to re-skill or upskill a particular agent. Thanks to powerful pre-built gadgets for ticketing, customer management, agent scripting, and more, the Cisco Finesse Supervisor Desktop enables supervisors to ensure that their agents deliver excellent customer service at all times.

#7. Screen Pop

When a customer contacts a call center via phone, the call center software receives the call, alerts an available agent, and transfers the call to their workflow. Through this alert, the agent knows that there is a caller on the line. He can also immediately see relevant information about that caller that’s already present in the system. This happens through “screen pops”. A screen pop – enabled by Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), which integrates the contact center solution with other business applications such as a CRM – provides the agent with information such as the customer’s name, contact details, purchase history, and contact history. With the screen pop, agents don’t have to waste time looking for this information, or worse, annoy customers by asking them to verify their details. As a result, they can immediately focus on resolving the customer’s query. Screen pops are easy to use and automatic; they help speed up call resolutions and also increase agent efficiency. They also enable agents to provide personalized service (e.g. greet callers by name) which is a great way to improve CSAT and CX over time.

NovelVox offers an embedded CTI connector for EPIC and Freshdesk with screen pop functionality. This tool provides agents with unified information and advanced controls at their fingertips, which decreases AHT and ensures high call resolution. It also empowers agents to improve customer communications and deliver the personalized experiences customers are looking for.

Need help? Talk to NovelVox!

For over a decade, NovelVox has delivered fully-customizable solutions to high-performing contact centers all over the world. From agent desktops and CTI connectors to wallboards and scripting tools, the next-gen contact center solutions from NovelVox are designed for your specific needs. To book a free demo for any of our solutions, contact us.