You may think of a “call center” as being a massive room full of agents, but in fact, a call center may be very small. Call centers are often used for the following business functions: Catalog sales, Customer service, Collections, Help desks, Reservation and Telemarketing.

Call center software can greatly improve your business, even if you only have a few agents fielding customer service calls, and it can give your business a more professional interface with customers.

This article will give you the benefits of utilizing call center software, its features, and the costs that you can expect. There is also a cost breakdown that shows you how to save money on your call center software.

The benefits fall into five basic categories: improved customer service, decreased customer wait times, lower employment costs, increased employee productivity, and reporting for analyzing call center performance.

1. Improved Customer Service

By giving your company a uniform way to handle calls, customers know that when they call, their calls will be handled professionally and are less likely to be dropped. Without call center software, informal customer service procedures can lead to customers being placed on hold and forgotten, or customer calls going unanswered.

2. Decreased Customer Wait Times

Using the right software can automatically route calls to available agents so that customer wait time is minimized. If you include a menu system, customer input helps calls go to the right person for the call, reducing call transfers and cutting down on the time the customer spends on the phone. Simple call routing features prevent some agents having a call backlog while other agents have no calls.

3. Lower Employment Costs

Using good software allocates call agent time optimally, cutting down on the need for extra staffing and overtime. This distributes calls optimally and lets you plan call center staffing more accurately. The savings on overtime in one year can be significant.

4. Higher Employee Productivity

Features like predictive dialing keep call center agents from having to dial calls and deal with unanswered lines and answering machines. Those with predictive dialing dials pre-programmed numbers, and when someone answers, the software routes the call to an available agent automatically. This keeps call agents productive and relieves them of the tedious and mistake-prone task of manual dialing.

5. Reporting for Analysis of Call Center Performance

This software today offers powerful reporting capabilities on any number of metrics, including time spent per call or per agent, number of calls answered, and times of day when calls are heaviest. With reporting features, you can easily analyze your call center’s performance and make adjustments as necessary. For example, you may find that you need more agents during certain hours or on certain days of the week, and you can schedule shifts accordingly.

The time when a company decides to move to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools marks their progress to professionalism and profit in multiple ways. This guide will give you guidelines for companies who are thinking about this critical step in their development.

Before the advent of computers, salespeople used a combination of manual tools to track prospects and their multiple contacts with those prospects needed to turn them into customers. These “tools” included yellow tablets, stacks of business cards with notes written on the back all bound together by rubber bands, and Rolodex cards.

Companies planning to grow and succeed realize customers are the lifeblood of their business in a more profound way than when they started, and properly managing customers becomes the key to long term growth. They begin to notice certain signs that indicate a step up to CRM is necessary in order to improve the value of them to their customers, and of their customers to them.

The three foundations of a good CRM system are people, process, and technology. Too many focus on just the technology and spend months analyzing minute details of competing software applications while their sales drift aimlessly. Smarter companies analyze the sales processes they have now, make note of where improvements are needed, and start building new processes with employee training as well as the software application. Technology is only one of the three successful lets of a CRM system.

Take time to define the expectations each department has of the new process, make sure they align with other departments and the capabilities of the software involved, and make sure those who aren’t behind the new project don’t create unmanageable expectations. Keep a close watch on the software vendor as well, as their enthusiasm for their product may outrun the abilities of your particular installation. One way to solidify the expectations of all the CRM stakeholders is to carefully examine and record the sales management processes that are place now.

Here’s the real-world segue from Expectations to the Transition to a CRM system: you will need to expect a bumpy ride. The process rides a roller coaster: it’s terrible, it’s getting better, it’s worse than we ever thought, we’re finally home safe. The sales department, the group most affected by the new CRM system, suffers the most. Those who have used other systems will complain because the system at your company is different than what they know. All of this hassle for your transition time will be cured by training and with time. They will get to know the software as they used it.

Finally, all customer information will be in one place, including social media interactions and call-center support. You will be able to see the entire sales acquisition process from initial contact through prospect to customer to long-term customer. That is the best result of the CRM process.

If a company does well, it will eventually grow. But growth isn’t inevitable; in fact, growth is selective. It involves countless factors that go far beyond merely having good products and services. The economy’s condition at the time matters. The quality of the company’s staff matters. The vision of management matters. The willingness of the company to adjust to changing realities matters. The availability of cash/credit to fuel the growth matters.

It’s virtually impossible to cover every aspect of CRM for companies transitioning from a small to a midsize business. However, there are guidelines that will have value to you as you do this. Before you begin your search, keep in mind the far-reaching implications of the project you are about to embark on. When introducing new kinds of structured organization and procedures, the resulting cultural change is substantial — perhaps even greater than when growing from a midsize business into large enterprise.

The early days were hard work, but managing relationships with your customers was relatively simple. Your sales team was small, and you let them manage their day to day activities as they saw fit. They managed their own activities, and if you needed to know what they were working on, you simply talked about it, or reviewed a couple of emails or spreadsheets.

If your team needed answers, new products, flexible pricing or alternative packaging, they had a direct line to you or others who could respond quickly to customer needs and requests. You were small, agile and nimble. You moved more quickly than your competitors and earned business and grew your market share because of it. Most likely, your customers appreciated the response, cohesiveness and level of service they received from you and your organization.

But that growth has also brought new challenges that your organization hasn’t encountered before. You’re not quite as agile as you once were. You’ve probably expanded into new regions, opened new offices, hired more people, expanded your product or service offerings, and have a longer list of issues that you’re trying to solve internally, as well as for your customers and prospects.

What you’ve likely gained in revenues and profitability, you’ve likely lost in providing your customers and prospects with the same level of service and care that you were able to provide when you were just a few like-minded, hard-working individuals trying to build something big. So how do you continue to grow, while still providing the same (or better) customer experience that you did when you were a small business?

These are the things that we need to look for a CRM software:

1. Functional Silos

The job functions that were once performed by one or two people are now distributed across multiple functional groups with several people in each group. Each individual takes and performs his or her own sliver of the operational pie. The implication of this growth progression, as you may have learned, is that the potential for decisions to be made in a vacuum by each functional area has now increased. Accountability can be lost. Fingers can start to point. Marketing, sales and customer service aren’t quite on the same page anymore, and ultimately the customer suffers.

2. It should fit your needs

As your company grows, you also see a sprout of new needs arising. The best CRM will be the one that can eventually meld with whatever you throw at it. It should also be equipped with the best support team, when emergency arise, you can easily reach out – thus, reducing downtime for your business.

3. Topnotch technology

When choosing the software that you need, we must also check its features. We should never blindly choose one software over another, just because a sales person put you through it. It should provide you the features that will help you and your company grow along the way. It should also have the capability to make your agents or representatives more productive. By being more productive, it will eventually surmount to having more revenue.