What is Contact center CRM software?

In recent times, CRM call center software has gained massive growth, which has led to an increasing number of manpower in a company. 

Call center agents deal with humongous data and communication needs daily.

The global cloud-based contact center market is projected to reach USD 82.43 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 21.3% from 2022 to 2030. 

As a part of this high-growth industry, having strong call center CRM software is a basic need.

In this article, you will learn about what call center software is, and its benefits. 

What is a contact center CRM?

A call center CRM is software that helps agents to manage and track lead interactions, such as phone calls, emails, and chats. It integrates with the call center’s phone system and provides agents with real-time access to leads information to improve service.  

It also includes features like call tracking, reporting, scripting, and workflow automation to optimize performance.

Why do call centers need solid CRM?

• Handle inbound calls from prospects and current customers 
• Communicate with customers using various changes like emails, calls, and texts to provide timely and effective solutions
• Log every new activity from customers in their respective profiles and maintain a top-notch timeline
• Assign crucial conversations to the team leader or manager for better resolutions
• Collaborate with teammates on crucial customer problems and solve them on immediate basis
• Create reports to improve future performances 

What are the benefits of CRM for a call center?

CRM for call center can be highly beneficial if implemented the right way.  

If you have a growing call center, then you need to take a look at these CRM software benefits for your call center: 

1. Always be there for customers

As a call center, your main role is to always be available for your customers at all times. Most of the call centers operate 24/7.  

When you use a CRM, it automatically routes the calls to available customer support executive so that your customer doesn’t need to wait.  

With automatic call distribution, you can divide the workload equally among your team and manage all your inbound calls so that it’s easy to measure their performance.  

A contact center CRM software will serve as a platform that enhances your representatives’ efficiency and makes them more productive. 

 2. Stay connected with team members

There are always multiple data, information, and contacts in a call center.  

While communicating with customers, one may require real-time access to the data to resolve their query.  

In such a scenario, you cannot search for information from different sources.  

Using a CRM contact center solution will help you collaborate with your team members so that they can share and store all the files in one place, and everyone can access the customer data whenever they require.

3. Evaluating employee efficiency

CRM can easily help you evaluate your employee’s efficiency.  

This can be done using CRM features like activity tracking, listening to recorded calls, analyzing sales reports, and many more.  

These contact center CRM features enable you to understand how your team is performing, how many calls they have answered, and what has been the impact of their efforts.  

CRM allows you to evaluate your employee’s performance and provide you with insights that will help them grow.

4. Crucial data for employee training

As a call center process, the training needs to be done thoroughly.  

One of the major training activities involves listening to call recordings, and going through the chat history, etc.  

The call recording feature in CRM helps you to save the recordings to be used during these training sessions.  

Based on past customer interactions, you can create a standardized process to help you train your new joiners seamlessly.

5. Deliver exceptional customer experiences

CRM system is an essential tool for improving your overall customer experience.  

In fact, call centers are all about customer satisfaction and increased revenue.  

With the best contact center CRM, you can evaluate every stage of your business process, analyze where the bumps need to be fixed and scrutinize your support journey.  

You can make calls using outbound call center software, so companies must create a benchmark that helps measure customer experience.  

Conducting NPS surveys can help you identify your customer’s satisfaction levels so you can streamline your sales and CS processes.

6. Single source of truth for data

CRM is known to be your one-stop solution for all sales and customer  support activities.  

Among its various features, one of the main aspects of call center CRM is integration with third-party tools. So that you can bring all your data into sales pipeline CRM from other platforms and easily manage your operations.  

CRM automates your work and gives you more time for what matters most. Thus, proving it to be immensely cost-effective and time-saving. 

Essential features of call center CRM software

You have decided to get CRM software for call center. Now what? Let’s take a sneak peek at essential features every CRM for call center should offer. 

1. Efficiently make calls from one place

A cloud-based CRM has built-in calling feature that helps you make outbound calls without hassle.  

Therefore, when you are doing cold calling at your call center, you can execute it right from your CRM. You don’t need to switch to any other platform.

In fact, you can also pick local or toll-free numbers of different countries like Australia, UK, US virtual phone number and make calls to build credibility and appear local at the same time.  

With virtual call center CRM software for small business, you can easily integrate all of your customer service, sales, and marketing operations into one system. 

2. Improve your calling productivity

Traditional calling systems are expensive, time-consuming, or complex.   

A contact center CRM lets you automatically dial contacts from the selected activities one by one. Power Dialer let’s you make phone calls through lead lists without switching screens. With this feature, you can automate your calling and make more daily calls to get higher connections.

The power dialer works as a to-do list that will dial one call after another so that you don’t have to dial manually.  

Moreover, you can also drop pre-recorded voicemails on calls that are not answered.

3. Multiple communication channels

CRM with a virtual phone system lets you manage multiple communication channels from a single place apart from being cost-effective. You can make and receive calls, send emails and texts to your prospects to engage better and close more deals. 

Additionally, you can also utilize the live chat feature to manage all your customer queries and also use it to capture leads directly from your website. 

4. Better team collaboration

A Shared Team Inbox feature in CRM for call center allows your team to collaborate better. It eliminates the headache of collaborating with other team members, as everyone uses the same email address. You can also assign leads directly using shared team inbox to your reps and manage the workload effectively.   

While dealing with multiple customers at different stages, you may have to loop in another teammate. You can mention team members in a shared inbox and share important information as notes to avoid missing out on opportunities.  

This helps you provide quick responses to your leads and deliver better customer service.

5. Record calls for training purposes

As discussed above, call recordings are mainly used to train new employees. But, apart from this, it is even used to extract crucial information. 

This is a very useful feature of the CRM software that comes in handy with built-in calling feature.

You can use these conversations to assess your team’s interactions and provide valuable feedback to improve their sales and service performance.

This feature helps in making your reps more productive.

6. Integrations with useful tools

While working at a call center, you need to use different tools for different purposes. This becomes difficult to track when you have large data.  

Integrating your CRM with various platforms saves a lot of time as it helps to store all the information and documents in one place.    

Manage and track all your call or email interactions with your clients/prospects from a single place and stay updated. 

7. Get actionable reports

Manually creating reports is very time-consuming and can be inaccurate if you have a fragmented process.  

CRM comes with pre-built and customizable sales reports. This eliminates guesswork and lets you make smart decisions for your business process. Gain insights into the performance of individuals and the entire team to find the best performers and identify the reps who require coaching. 

Sales reports give you a clear picture of your sales goals, revenue, and team performance and help you formulate strategies. 

How to choose the best CRM for your call center?

After learning about the features and benefits of CRM, the next question arises: How do I choose the best CRM for call center?  

Call centers must maintain, track, and keep records of their data and information, along with delivering the best customer experience.  

Here are some pointers that will help you select the best CRM tools for call center that will benefit your business: 

1. Identify your organization’s needs

You must evaluate your key requirement for implementing CRM with your call center agents. You need to choose whether you want to speed up the process, eliminating unnecessary and time-consuming tasks or whether you need a single platform to store all your information.  

Based on your requirement, you can pick the best CRM for your call center. 

2. Look for the right features

You need to look for the feature that is most needed by your business. These features should be the ones solving your main challenges.  

It may be a shared team inbox feature to help your team collaborate better or a built-in calling feature so your team has a virtual phone system to manage all the call data.  

For better understanding, you can also ask for a free demo of the CRM so your team can get acquainted with the features. 

3. Set your budget

Your business needs to be specific when choosing the vendor.  

By simply studying a vendor’s website, you can get a good idea of the types and sizes of companies they work with.   

In addition, you can shortlist some CRMs and compare them.

5 Best contact center CRM you should know

There are various call center CRM software available in the market. You must be sure about picking the one that’s better with the most important features and fits your budget. 

Let’s look at some of the best CRMs available.

1. Salesmate

Salesmate is one of the best CRM for contact center.  

It offers simple, personal, and productive experiences for your team. Moreover, as an efficient CRM calling software for a call center, it provides the industry-best virtual phone system. Hence, you don’t need separate calling software. 

Key Salesmate features:

• Virtual phone system to engage with your leads in 80+ countries.  
• Built-in text & automation functions to carry the communication most efficiently. 
• Power dialer that automatically dials contacts from the selected activities one by one by using automation. 
• Seamless Integrations & apps to let you excel and grow your business without any limitations. 
• Sales report that improves your entire sales funnel. You can select interactive, pre-built, and customizable sales reports. 
• Call recording, call reports, and automated call forwarding are some features that ease your calling task. 

Pricing:

Basis plan cost $23/user/month 

Pro plan cost $39/user/month 

Business plan cost $63/user/month 

Enterprise – Custom

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is yet another CRM with calling software that is preferred by call center. It offers sales software, email marketing software, and powerful integrations so that you can stay connected with your existing technology stack.  

It is a tool to master sales calls with easy-access contact history and detailed insights. 

Key Pipedrive features:

• Workflow automation to connect your team and streamline call management. 
• Pipedrive provides a built-in phone so you can make calls right from your CRM. 
• Contact Management keeps your contacts organized by dividing them into “people” and “organizations” categories. 
• Sales reports help you analyze the results accurately.  

Pricing:

Essential plan cost $9.90/user/month 

Advanced plans cost $19.90/user/month 

Professional plan cost at $39.90/user/month 

Enterprise plans cost $59.90/user/month 

3. Freshworks

Freshworks makes it fast and easy for businesses to delight their customers. In addition, it makes telemarketing CRM calls easy.  

Freshworks is packed with powerful features that help call center streamline their entire process.

Key Freshworks features:

• Sales automation for easy sales activity. 
• Predictive contact scoring to focus on the best opportunities.  
• AI-powered chatbots to stay connected with visitors in real-time. 
• Slack integration to collaborate across teams in real-time. 
• Tailored email campaigns. 

Pricing:

Growth plan cost $12.87/user/month. 

Pro plan cost $36.06/month. 

The enterprise plan costs $64.40/month. 

4. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 offers a wide array of resources and features that can help call center improve their overall productivity and improve your revenue.  

It offers more than 30 tools for sales, administration, and marketing – a rarity among other free CRM platforms. Bitrix24 is an online collaboration, sales, and marketing suite that features 35+ business tools.

Key Bitrix24 features:

• Marketing automation to level up your marketing campaigns. 
• Sales analysis to help you make better decisions.
• Create customer tasks and projects to fulfill work for your company. 
• Contact center helps you manage your communication channels with CRM software. 
• Detailed reports that help you get an insight into your progress. 

Pricing:

Basic plans cost 36$/user/month 

Standard plan cost $72/user/month 

Professional plan cost $144.44/user/month

 5. LeadSquared

LeadSquared is an advanced CRM that allows call center to make calls efficiently and improve results.  

It enables you to transform your sales across all channels and helps you never miss a sales opportunity so you can witness 2x sales pipeline growth.

Key features of LeadSquared:

• Marketing automation that helps understand your prospects, build lasting relationships & increase your ROI.
• Workday planning helps you plan the workday of all your customer-facing teams. 
• Mobile CRM for flexible working. 
• Integration helps you integrate all the other apps with CRM. 

Pricing:

Lite plan cost $16.09/user/month 

Pro plan cost $ 77.65/user/month 

Super plan cost $64.39/user/month 

After learning about these CRMs, you can easily select the best one. Here’s the link to help you compare the best CRM available in the market and pick the right one.  

Bottomline

CRM plays a vital role in your call center. CRM is beneficial in many ways and can be used as a single platform for all your business needs.  

Salesmate has proven to be that one-stop solution for all your business needs. So, if you are looking for the best call center CRM, you need to check out Salesmate!