XM Knowledge Base
Author: Adam Bunker
Subject Matter Expert: Dave Pabley
What is a contact center software solution?
A contact center software solution is a collection of automated software processes that work together to make a contact center more efficient, better equipped, and better able to serve its customers.
It can be used to:
- Streamline costs and increase business efficiencies
- Evaluate and coach contact center agents
- Track and improve the customer experience
- Monitor regulatory compliance and reduce risk
Make your contact center your competitive advantage with Qualtrics
What’s the difference between a contact center solution and call center software?
A contact center encompasses all the potential touchpoints a customer might use to reach out to your business, including:
- Inbound calls
- Social media interactions
- Chat and chatbot interactions
- Emails
- SMS/text
- and more
Call center software usually focuses specifically on handling incoming calls, whereas contact center software likely includes multiple communication channels.
Learn more about Qualtrics® Contact Center Experience software
What are the different types of contact center solutions?
There’s a wide range of contact center software types out there, each with its own purpose. Depending on the sort of contact center you operate, you may need one or more working together.
For example, you might implement a solution for:
More efficient operations and workforce optimization
For contact centers to understand and meet their customers’ needs, contact center leaders need to plan strategically. Using leading software can help to optimize your operations – you’ll know what areas of the business need prioritizing and what you’re doing well.
Say one agent is performing well and another is scoring lower than expected. Contact center software can pick up on that discrepancy and deliver it as insights, allowing you to coach and enable your agents to do what they do best: deliver a great customer experience.
Examples might include:
- Real-time reporting software
- Smart call routing / automatic call routing for business phone systems
- Workforce management tools
- A cloud-based contact center platform
An improved customer experience
Sometimes it’s not about powering the contact center or optimizing operations – it’s about providing a more helpful, intuitive or pleasant customer experience. Contact center software should enable your customer service teams to provide more personalized phone support, or your marketing team to present tailored offers.
Examples might include:
- Help desk software
- A cloud-based solution for your CRM
- Call recording for customer feedback analysis
- A self-serve customer service portal
- Performance management tools
- Omnichannel messaging
The benefits of using contact center software
Contact center leaders need to think strategically about where to invest their funding to ensure that both internal and external stakeholders’ needs are met. Contact centers don’t just have to be for addressing customer questions – they can be a hub for innovation and insights when powered by the right software.
For this reason, using contact center software can unlock multiple benefits across your business. From better customer relationship management to reduced strain on your customer service teams, investing in contact center software options provides tangible ROI.
For example, you might see:
Better customer experiences
In our research on global consumer trends, 62% of customers we surveyed said helpful agents made them happy in their contact center experience, and 52% said agent empathy made a difference. When customers get the right customer support the first time, with agents who understand their history with the brand, they feel more warm towards your business.
That positive sentiment can go a long way toward higher customer satisfaction and boosted sales.
Reduced costs
When your contact centers are powered by all the features we’ll discuss later, you’re able to revolutionize your operations and reduce costs.
For example, when incoming calls are streamlined, your contact centers don’t have to work so hard to meet customer needs. You can deploy agents only where needed for priority calls, allow customers to self-serve, use artificial intelligence (AI) to live chats and reduce the rate of repeat calls and escalations. All of these actions reduce cost-to-serve and improve customer lifetime value.
You can also utilize cloud contact center software to eliminate your need to have a location-specific center. With a cloud-based contact center, your agents can be situated anywhere, without the complicated infrastructure that traditional and likely outdated telephone hardware can bring. This can significantly reduce business costs.
Improved loyalty and advocacy
How a customer feels after interacting with a brand is more important than whether they were even able to do what they aimed to do. Contact center software that improves the customer experience – from swift customer support down to personalized customer journeys – generates positive sentiment.
Customers who find it “very easy” to interact with a brand are 8.1 times more likely to recommend that brand to others, and customers who “completely succeeded” in getting the experience they were after are 6.3 times more likely to recommend.
Easier management with in-depth insights
Ideally, your contact center should be agile, with iterative management that can flex with customer and business needs. No more missing small problems that snowball into larger issues – real-time reporting and insights mean you’re constantly uncovering risks, opportunities, and emerging trends – and taking action on them.
Creating a technology-based ecosystem for contact center support ensures information gets where it needs to go, faster. For example, being able to handle interactions more efficiently with help desk software that’s customer insight-led means your agents can handle priority issues with all the information they need.
Data-based insights delivered on a holistic platform mean that vital information on pain points, common issues, and technological failures is seen instantly by the right people.
Happier and more engaged agents
It’s not just your customers who benefit from better contact center software – your support teams also stand to see an improvement in their experiences. More than one-third (38%) of contact center agents don’t feel they have what they need to succeed, and just 54% of agents believe their leadership has invested in their support team. Your support teams need support, too.
Streamlining customer workflows in your contact center means your agents can spend less time on tedious, repetitive everyday queries and can focus on priority interactions for maximum effectiveness. Lower call volumes lead to less workplace stress and lower agent turnover.
Additionally, rather than scoring your agents on a handful of sampled calls, you can automatically evaluate every interaction they have with customers to get an accurate and objective view of their approach and the potential progress they can make. You can also offer real-time coaching prompts to help them improve as they go.
All of these actions help the members of your support team to feel more engaged with their work, reducing churn and offering insight-driven progression and development.
Learn more about Qualtrics Contact Center Experience software
The best contact center features you should be looking out for
AI with Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Natural language processing tools can monitor conversations happening on any touchpoint – from calls to social media posts – understand what’s being said, and bring everything together to provide agents with a clear view of customer histories and opinions. By understanding the effort, intent, and emotion underpinning any and every customer interaction, AI-enabled tools can route queries to the right channel or person – and provide agents with real-time prompts to ensure that customers feel listened to, understood, and empathized with.
Omnichannel messaging
Customers no longer stick to one channel when it comes to customer service. They move from channel to channel, often giving feedback on third-party platforms that can’t always be monitored manually. As such, today’s contact center software needs to think and work with an omnichannel mindset – it needs to enable your team to understand the customer journey across platforms and touchpoints seamlessly.
Automatic call routing with ACDs and IVR
A contact center can often primarily be a call center, meaning you need a call center solution that can get customers’ queries to the right person in real time. You can use a system that utilizes automatic call distributor (ACD) software for call routing to the most appropriate department or representative.
Ideally, you’ll also have contact center software powered with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), allowing customers who phone in to choose their call direction with a menu. This enables your customer support teams to better triage customers for more efficient and helpful interactions.
Rather than be left waiting on hold and find out they’re speaking to a general department or even the wrong person, Interactive Voice Response allows customers to self-direct to a relevant responder.
An integrated CRM tool with CTI
Customers like to feel as though brands know them, and the last thing they want is to explain time and time again who they are and their history with your business. Offering your support team the vital context they need via computer-telephony integration (CTI) software that integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This means they can automatically identify callers, see their interaction history, and subsequently provide a personalized experience.
Cloud contact center software
Moving to a cloud-based contact center means you can essentially operate from anywhere. Cloud-based calling and other digital interactions can be made without a conventional, on-premise telephone system, breaking your brand free of the cost of maintaining a physical solution.
Cross-channel support becomes easier, and you can automate more efficiently. Not only that, but you can operate from anywhere in the world.
Top 10 contact center solutions to explore
Ready to supercharge your CX? Here are 10 market-leading software suites that can help empower your contact center agents to go above and beyond.
1. Qualtrics
Overview: Ours is a total, fully-featured solution that wraps up everything the modern contact center needs to outperform the market when it comes to CX.
Key features:
- Real-time feedback uncovers agent coaching opportunities
- Real-time prompts that guide the agent conversations
- Frontline recognition programs
- Score 100% of interactions in multiple languages
- Reduce cost to serve by automating manual work
- Connect 35+ digital and human channels to a single platform
- Automatically identify the root cause of common issues
- Optimize chatbots to provide more accurate, empathetic responses
- Identify key moments of friction along the customer journey
- Automatically trigger insights to be shared with the right teams
- Become a hub of insights for the organization
Why this is a top contact center solution:
Qualtrics knows what consumers expect, and what agents need to deliver on those expectations. That’s why our solution combines web-wide listening and natural language processing with AI-powered agent prompts and tools, alongside proactive scoring and coaching. Market-leading insights and analytics present your team with actionable next steps for improving every step of every customer journey – and transform the contact center into your business’ informational nerve center.
Unlock CX excellence with Qualtrics Extensions…
Qualtrics offers a bunch of out-of-the-box and tailored extensions that let you use our features with other popular CX suites. These tools allow you to get the most out of Qualtrics while seamlessly integrating with your existing products.
For each of the below contact center software providers, we’ll let you know if we have a relevant extension that can help you drive stronger customer connections.
You can learn more about our extensions here.
2. ZenDesk
Overview: ZenDesk brings customer information into one place and provides agents with a simplified workspace that incorporates customer history.
Key features:
- Unified agent-friendly workspace
- Smart ticketing and task assignment
- Customer history and context information in one place
- Customizable self-service tools
- CX data and analytics that merge information from every channel
Why this is a top contact center solution:
ZenDesk’s agent workspace brings all custom conversations, updates and information into one place, reducing the need to jump around from window to window to get full customer context. That’s on top of omnichannel messaging, unified ticketing and next-step actions, and CRM analytics.
✅ Works with Qualtrics
The Zendesk extension allows you to create and update Zendesk tickets, profiles, and records based on responses collected with Qualtrics surveys.
3. Talkdesk
Overview: A cloud-based contact center software with pre-built ’Experience Clouds’ designed specifically for individual industries.
Key features:
- Customer self-service features
- Inter-agent communication tools and analytics
- Hiring platform for recruiting new agents
- Packages pre-built for specific industries
- AI automation tools
Why this is a top contact center solution:
Talkdesk has a specific focus on enabling contact centers to perform remotely – from home or wherever they need to be. One unique feature here is the inbuilt Talkdesk CXTalent, which is a hiring platform designed to help you find and recruit new CX agents – all of whom will have been verified as having passed Talkdesk’s Academy course.
4. HubSpot
Overview: A wide-ranging set of solutions for everything from CRM to marketing, alongside customer service software with unified messaging.
Key features:
- Secure customer portal
- Knowledge base tools
- Shared inbox and omnichannel messaging
- Customer survey tools
- ‘Playbook’ feature for building a resource library for agents
Why this is a top contact center solution:
HubSpot’s Service Hub customer support software offers a shared inbox and unified messaging with an omnichannel approach. There’s reporting, surveys, knowledge base functionality, and customizable workflows that help you design your contact center processes with ‘if this, then that’ building blocks. It works with HubSpot’s CRM software but also plays nicely with Qualtrics via our dedicated extension.
✅ Works with Qualtrics
The Hubspot extension allows you to create and update deals, contacts, tickets, and companies in Hubspot based on collected survey responses.
5. Gladly
Overview: Gladly promotes what it calls the ‘loyalty era’ of customer service by using AI to supplement human agents.
Key features:
- Single-stream messaging history
- AI summaries and prompts
- Tailored, personalized self-service options
- Automation tools
Why this is a top contact center solution:
Gladly puts a focus on omnichannel messaging that creates a ‘lifelong’ stream of information and context for each customer that gets in touch – instead of a ticketing system that bounces people around. It uses AI to find the right agent for the right person and provide real-time guidance on calls.
6. Genesys
Overview: This cloud call center software provider offers seamless cross-channel support.
Key features:
- Inbound and outbound contact facilitation through cloud telephony
- Artificial intelligence-based bot support
- Data based insights
- Workforce management
- Automatic call distribution (ACD)
- And more.
Why this is a top contact center solution:
The intuitive cloud-based phone system created by Genesys offers digital experience management that pivots with your business needs. Rather than being limited by your physical capacity, this cloud-based call center software enables fluid customer journey orchestration from all touchpoints, handled in one centralized hub.
7. Salesforce
Overview: A powerful CRM tool, this cloud-based platform offers the ability to forecast business revenue and track sales leads.
Features:
- Customer data management and contact management
- Workforce management with workflow options
- Sales opportunity and pipeline management
- Contract, quote and order management
- Interaction tracking, forecasting and pipeline visualization
- Customer relationship management
- And more
Why this is a top contact center solution:
Used the world over by many businesses, this well-known solution gives your brand a detailed look at customer information and sales management. Integrating this software with a contact center platform allows brands to efficiently manage their sales streams and devote effort and financial support to where it’s needed.
✅ Works with Qualtrics
The Salesforce extension allows for the ability to send transactional surveys from Salesforce, pass information into Qualtrics, and map data back to Salesforce. Additionally, the Salesforce App allows you to send surveys and view dashboards directly in Salesforce.
8. Five9
Overview: A cloud-based solution, Five9 enables not just cloud-based calling, but customer contact via email, chat, SMS, social channels and more.
Key features:
- Inbound and outbound calls
- Integration with workforce management tools such as Zendesk, Salesforce and Microsoft Teams
- Call transcriptions in real-time
- CRM data access for agents
- Predictive dialing
- And more
Why this is a top contact center solution:
This solution makes having a cloud-based call center simple and effortless. With sophisticated AI capabilities, many of the background processes that can occupy your team’s time are automated. It’s efficient and streamlined, with helpful prompts for your team to provide a better customer experience across all your communication channels.
✅ Works with Qualtrics
Integrating with Five9 enables you to consolidate and analyze all of your contact center data in one place. You can then analyze your data using any Qualtrics analysis method, including Text iQ in a CX dashboard.
9. ServiceNow
Overview: End siloed processes with ServiceNow. Digitization and automation are made easy through a sophisticated serverless computing and workflow management system.
Key features:
- Real-time communication, resource sharing and team collaboration
- Anomaly detection
- Predictive modeling
- Performance forecasting
- Workflow and workforce management
- And more
Why this is a top contact center solution:
Most workflows can be supported by this center software solution, with the ability to apply a wide range of tools to manage everything from large-scale projects to tweaking minor workflows. With machine learning and artificial intelligence as well as legacy system integration, this contact center software makes streamlining operations a breeze.
✅ Works with Qualtrics
The ServiceNow extension allows you to create and update records in ServiceNow as well as update customer contact information provided by survey responses.
10. Amazon Connect
Overview: An easily scaled cloud-based solution for your contact center needs, this flexible system enables omnichannel customer service.
Key features:
- Inbound and outbound calling, as well as omnichannel voice and chat facilitation
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning insights into customer sentiment, as well as caller authentication
- Unified customer profiling
- Real-time recommendations and in-depth analytics
- And more
Why this is a top contact center solution:
This is no ordinary call center software. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a well-known cloud-based platform providing brands of all sizes with the cloud contact centers they need to scale at will and at a lower cost. The scale of adoption and breadth of experience AWS has means that this tool is well-honed for any needs.
✅ Works with Qualtrics
Integrating with Amazon Connect allows you to bring your customer interaction data from Amazon into Qualtrics. This data can then be used in Qualtrics workflows or analyzed using any Qualtrics analysis method, including Text iQ in a CX dashboard.
Maximize the value of your contact center with Qualtrics
Ultimately, contact center software should allow your agents and business as a whole to be more effective, minimizing operational costs and driving loyalty through improved customer experiences.
This is why Qualtrics, with a single system of action and integrations with contact center partners, allows you to put customer experience at the heart of business and meet customer needs through your contact center.
Qualtrics’ contact center solution is a connected, intelligent system that provides a unified, omnichannel view across all your data. It applies powerful analytics to help you create better customer experiences, surface opportunities and identify issues in real time in order to best serve customers.
How does Qualtrics’ contact center technology differ from other options on the market? Here are a few ways:
- Natural language Processing (NLP)-powered conversation analytics, empowering agents with insights to provide the best service and drive customer satisfaction
- Omnichannel listening and analytics on data integrated from more than 35 social and digital channels, allowing you to surface context-driven insights and take meaningful action
- Rich customer profiles designed to personalize experiences for increased customer satisfaction
- Holistic overview of agent performance with 100% interaction scoring across multiple languages and channels, providing fairer and more accurate methods of evaluating agents and customer interactions
- Automated compliance management for easier, more consistent oversight
- Automatic issue detection and resolution insights for swift management of pain points
- Optimized chatbot support with CRM insights for personalized customer experiences
- Customer and process insights with delivery to the right team in real-time for improved customer experience and increased loyalty
We are constantly driving actions across your business for improved operation and offer customer-first solutions that have significant ROI.
Make your contact center your competitive advantage with Qualtrics