Compare Call Center Software

A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. A contact centre is a location for centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.

A call centre has an open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.

The contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management.

A contact centre can be defined as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for the customer and organization. Contact centres, along with call centres and communication centres all fall under a larger umbrella labelled as the contact centre management industry. This is becoming a rapidly growing recruitment sector in itself, as the capabilities of contact centres expand and thus require ever more complex systems and highly skilled operational and management staff.

The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their customer interaction. These centres can be operated by either an in house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres). (Source:Wikipedia.com)

Call center software is the software system that allows a company or organization to run a call center.
There are hundreds of different providers of call center software across the globe, and every call center software system has its pros and cons.

When selecting the right call center software for your business, contact center, or call center, it’s important to decide which features you want your phone system to have. This page lets you compare call center software providers.
Call center software is the software system that allows a company or organization to run a call center.

There are hundreds of different providers of call center software across the globe, and every call center software system has its pros and cons. When selecting the right call center software for your business, contact center, or call center, it’s important to decide which features you want your phone system to have.

Types of Call Center Software
Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Predictive Dialer
Call Center Monitoring
Call Accounting Software
Call Analytics

ACD helps productivity by assigning inbound agents to incoming calls. The automatic call distributor uses a set of instructions to determine who gets the call in the system. The algorithm can route calls based on agent skill or whoever has an idle phone. ACD can use caller ID or automatic number identification, but usually interactive voice response is enough to help the system determine the reason for the call.

An automatic call distributor can also take advantage of computer telephony integration. Agents can receive relevant data on their computers along with the incoming call.

Computer telephony integration is a broad category of software that connects telephone and computer systems. Computer telephony integration software can have both desktop and server functions. Various applications make up a system that can control phones, display call information, and route and report calls. For more information click here

Interactive voice response allows callers to route themselves to the appropriate department or use the company’s database for assistance. More sophisticated interactive voice response systems can access accounts and perform certain tasks, such as activating a credit card through a bank’s phone system. IVR involves using dial tone multi-frequency or voice commands. In the VoIP industry, a PBX auto attendant is near interchangeable with IVR. However, auto attendants are not capable of speech recognition.

A predictive dialer calls a list of phone numbers at once. Outbound agents are then connected to the numbers that answer. A predictive dialer uses calculations to minimize the idle time of agents and the potential of losing answered calls when no agents are available. (Source: voip-info.org)

Free CRM for Call Centers
Bitrix24 is #1 free CRM for call centers. You can start making and receiving phone calls from Bitrix24 CRM as soon as you register free cloud version. Integration with telephony provider is NOT required (but possible). You can rent local and toll free phone numbers in 43 countries worldwide for only $4-$11/mo. Our calling rates are extremely affordable – one to three cents a minute. VoIP phones, SIP phones, softphones are all supported, but not required.

If you want to connect Bitrix24 to your PBX (Asterisk, FreePBX, 3CX, Elastix and others) or telephony provider, you can via SIP connector provided. If you want to customize Bitrix24, the self hosted version comes with open source code access. The range of services available through Bitrix24 is standard for call center CRM software. Call queues, call to all, extensions, call recording, call transfers, caller ID, callers are automatically connected to assigned agents, phone hour settings, missed phone calls are logged as leads, etc.

Native IVR, SMS sending and progressive dialer are currently in beta test, but outside solutions can easily integrated with Bitrix24 if you need those. Bitrix24 mobile apps for iOS and Android let you ‘carry’ your call center with you anywhere you go.

When we say free, we really mean it. You only pay for Bitrix24 if you want to have more than 12 agents use our cloud call center CRM system. Register now or check out videos and CRM manual for quick start.

More Resources For Call Center Reporting Software