While setting up a call center, a business owner must be clear of the objectives that he wishes to accomplish. The nature of a business can be a strong indicator of the type of call center that the business owner should consider establishing. An outbound call center software is more suitable for businesses that wish to focus more on increasing sales and expanding the business while an inbound call center could be the answer to the businesses that wish to improve their customer retention and increase customer satisfaction. An outbound call center software has features and functionalities that contribute to helping the organization reach out to more potential customers while an inbound call center solution facilitates the calling experience for the customer by increasing the productivity of the agents and the systems that have been set up to interact with the customers.

Inbound Call Center Software:

Inbound call centers are designed to focus more on improving the customer experience of the organization. Your existing customers might be facing a problem that needs to be fixed; a certain complaint that needs to be resolved on time. Now imagine a scenario where thousands of customers are facing the same issue. Your organization needs to be well equipped to handle such grievances in order to retain customers. An inbound call center solution helps in building the customer relationship and enhances the overall brand identity of the organization.

Here are a few key features of an Inbound Call Center Solution:

IVR Systems:

An IVR system interacts with a customer, gathers the necessary information and routes the calls to the most appropriate agent. IVRs also automate trivial issues such as balance inquiries and updates on promotions and offers so that your customer care agents can focus on more important aspects of their jobs. IVRs also reduces the time that it takes a customer to get in touch with the right customer care representative with the help of effective routing. IVRs help simplify the work of the agents and subsequently boost customer satisfaction.

Reporting and Monitoring:

An inbound call center solution empowers businesses to analyze the trends and behavior of customers and helps managers to make smarter, data-driven decisions. An inbound call center solution provides the necessary metrics so that the managers can make evaluations that could contribute to the productivity and improvement of the agents.

CTI Pop Ups:

An inbound call center solution has a feature known as ‘CTI pop-ups’ that displays the information of a customer right before an agent is connected to them on call. This feature helps an agent get an overview of the customer’s history and helps them get valuable insights on how to better interact with them.

Features of Outbound Call Center Software Solution :

Reaching out to a wide audience can be quite difficult and cumbersome, especially when you have to reach out to thousands of customers every day. Having such large scale activities can, quite frankly, be impossible for small businesses to achieve if they don’t have the right solution. With a solution such as an outbound call center software, businesses can make themselves heard to thousands of customers at once. Outbound call centers are designed to increase the customer base of a company by reaching out to more and more customers. This is a sales-centric call center approach where active engagement with the customers is the primary goal. An outbound call center software generally comes in handy to businesses that have a large target audience. Outbound solutions help reach out to a wide audience in minimum time.

Key features of an Outbound Call Center Software:

Automated Dialer – Outbound Call Center Software:

A feature that allows call center agents to place calls without having to dial manually. Once you feed numbers to an outbound dialing solution, it starts making automatic calls to the customers and connects these calls to the next available agent. This feature increases the productivity of agents and reduces the time wasted due to manual dialing. It also reduces the errors that occur while an agent manually dials numbers.

Automated Broadcast – Outbound Call Center Software:

A feature that helps broadcast messages and voice notifications to multiple customers at once. Automated broadcast empowers businesses to update customers about their latest offers and promote their services more efficiently. It serves as a perfect marketing tool for businesses that wish to reach out to a large customer base in minimum time.

Dynamic Campaign Management – Outbound Call Center Software:

Dynamic Campaign Management allows a supervisor to create and manage multiple marketing campaigns at one time. These campaigns can be targeted to focus on different demographics and time zones simultaneously. The call campaigns can be set-up in advance and run according to the time most suitable to the targeted audience. This contributes to improving the sales and increasing the conversion ratios significantly.

If you wish to start a call center business, it best to analyze your area of expertise before finalising on the kind of call center that you would like to begin. If your experience leans towards customer experience, it would be more appropriate for you to invest your resources in a call center that focuses on inbound services. As a salesperson, you would do better in taking a step forward in outbound services. The skills and training required for both these services are unique and diverse and if you intend to build a team that nurtures either one of them, you should be well experienced in the field or must be in a position to hire a manager with prior experience in the field.