The call center industry is on the list of the top 10 fastest growing industry verticals. Call centers offer different services to businesses and customer care is one of the major services offered by call centers. Hundreds of calls are conducted by these businesses every day and in some cases every hour. This massive operational requirement needs the best communication tool that can withhold the stress and load and still offer excellent quality and performance. FreeSWITCH Development can be the technology that has the competence to meet the technology requirement of building this kind of robust solution.
How FreeSWITCH Development Can Improve Call Center Operations and Customer Service?
Let’s explore in detail how it can support the call center industry in various aspects including optimization of operations with augmented results and enhanced customer service models. To see the complete sight, we will cover the following points in this blog post.Â
- What is the working model of a call center?Â
- What are the major challenges faced by call centers?Â
- What is FreeSWITCH?Â
- How does FreeSWITCH Overpower the challenges faced by call centers?Â
- Concluding notesÂ
So, without further ado, let’s explore details about this subject matter.
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What is the working model of a call center?
The call center industry operates on the outsourcing model. Generally, call centers take outsourced projects from different businesses to provide them with the required services and manpower to meet daily business needs.Â
A call center may focus on a single operational area or provide multiple services to businesses. Some of the common offshore services offered by these businesses are briefed below:Â
- Customer care: To offer post-sales support to customers.Â
- Lead generation: Running cold calling and telemarketing or telesales campaigns to generate new leads.Â
- Lead conversion: To run outbound campaigns or handle inbound leads and convert them into sales.Â
- Feedback and Survey: To run surveys and feedback campaigns to collect data for different causes or reasons.Â
- Business Processing Operations: To handle different business processes and provide predefined services.Â
As diversifications are getting added to businesses and operations in businesses, the diversification in the service offering is getting increased in the call center industry, too. Thus, the offering list of the call center may vary depending on the industry it serves. Â
A common working model of a call center is as follows:Â
- Collect the requirements from the customer company and also receive the required knowledge base and training to provide the expected services.
- Use the call center software to run inbound, outbound, and/ or blended campaigns to offer the required services to customers.Â
- Create periodic reports to provide details on how the campaigns are performing to the customer company.Â
In addition to that, a call center may also run its own sales, marketing, and customer care campaigns to continue growing the business. This is a general working model of the call center, and it requires different solutions, including, but not limited to a call center solution.Â
2. What Are The Major Challenges Faced By Call Centers?
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In offering the best services to customers with excellent customer care services and augmenting operations, there are several challenges that call centers face. Let’s explore the major ones:Â
Difficulty in managing the uptime of the software with a high workloadÂ
Call centers often handle multiple calls every hour and this increases the stress on the software. Moreover, in a call center, there are multiple agents handling multiple calls. A call center needs to manage the high availability of the software to cater to these customers. The unavailability of agents, long call queues, or software crashes can lead to several consequences. Â
Difficulty in managing spike in call volumeÂ
A spike in call traffic in call centers is common. There are several occasions such as the holiday season, discount launches, etc., which increase call traffic. The software of the call center needs to be scalable enough to manage the increased call volume. Often, this becomes a major challenge for call centers because there are not many available solutions that support instant scalability.Â
Difficulty in managing multiple branches Â
A call center business is huge and therefore, a majority of call centers have multiple branches to run a local call center. These branches can be within the same nation or worldwide. The software often has limitations in granting access to features to a branch based on different conditions. There are also other limitations and challenges related to creating a multi-branch ecosystem for a call center.Â
Difficulty in introducing delightful automation Â
Automation has become the need of time and increasing customer demand. In the call center industry, even self-serving options are quite popular. Moreover, the call center software comes up with different features of automation to help businesses save time and increase productivity. However, it is necessary to be mindful while introducing automation to ensure you are delighting clients and not frustrating them. This becomes a challenge when creating a software solution with automation to meet these demands and still deliver the right customer services.Â
Difficulty in Leveraging The Power of Existing Infrastructure Â
Call centers often have existing tools and software platforms along with a contact center solution. It often becomes challenging for these businesses to use the existing solutions along with the call center dialer software. This slows down operations and also impacts customer services negatively. In addition to that, some solutions increase compatibility issues and create challenges in letting a call center use existing infrastructure with a dialer.Â
3. What is FreeSWITCH?Â
FreeSWITCH is an open-source telecom stack that empowers FreeSWITCH development companies to build different telephony solutions. Its modular architecture makes it possible to develop customized solutions to meet the tailored needs of industries like call centers. This open-source platform can manage voice, video, and data on a single line. It can support communication between PRI and SIP lines. There are several amazing offerings of this platform that makes FreeSWITCH perfect for building a call center solution for a business with custom features. Not only this, but it also helps in overcoming all major challenges a call center faces with the software built with other technologies. Furthermore, FreeSWITCH developers also ensure that businesses in this industry can leverage the power of fundamental needs of optimizing operations for augmented returns and improving customer services to retain clients and increase happy clientele.Â
4. How Does FreeSWITCH Overpower The Challenges Faced By Call Centers?
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In multiple ways, FreeSWITCH based software can empower call centers to achieve common goals of operation optimization and enhancement of customer services. Let’s explore the major challenges overcome by this technology.Â
Provide uptime up to 99.95% Â
FreeSWITCH has a modular architecture, which empowers FreeSWITCH development companies to develop robust solutions. Each component of FreeSWITCH can be clustered and that makes it possible for development companies to develop a system with a high availability cluster model. This can help businesses to achieve 99.95% of the uptime of the software and in many cases even more than that. Â
When a system delivers high uptime, it becomes possible to achieve high marks for customer service and operational efficiency.Â
Easily manage the spike in call volumeÂ
Handling call spikes in a call center is very important and FreeSWITCH development services can help you achieve this. FreeSWITCH is a highly scalable solution, and it is not bound to manage only a certain number of calls per second (CPS) or concurrent calls. It can manage any number of calls and still provides high performance along with excellent Quality of Service (QoS) and excellent Quality of Call (QoC). Thus, a FreeSWITCH development company can take advantage of this potential of FreeSWITCH to build a highly scalable solution that can be scaled up to meet the need of handling an increased number of calls.Â
This helps in reducing call queues and providing quicker services to customers. The operations will not stop at any point. All this will lead to increased flexibility in managing any number of calls or even a sudden spike in traffic due to the holiday season or any other reason.Â
Professionally manage multiple branchesÂ
Expansion of business is common in the call center industry similar to any other industry verticals. It often becomes difficult to manage each branch of the company to optimize operations universally and offer unified customer support across all branches without the right software.Â
FreeSWITCH is renowned for offering highly reliable multi-tenant solutions. With the help of FreeSWITCH developers, a call center can get a multi-tenant call center solution developed. This solution provides a GUI panel to let management create multiple tenant accounts. Each tenant account will operate as an individual call center dialer software solution assigned to each branch. The central branch will have control over all tenant accounts. It can assign and revoke features to each branch. It can also generate reports and even monitor the usage of the system in real time.Â
FreeSWITCH is also excellent in offering a system that can support multiple languages, multiple currencies, etc. Thus, if a call center has local branches in different countries, then it is possible to develop a multilingual solution. This will make it easier for local staff to operate the software. It helps in hiring the best talent without facing any language barrier.Â
As a single system is administering all branches of a call center, it becomes easier for the main headquarters of the call center to define processes and implement them across all branches. This helps in delivering a universal experience to customers across countries and it also optimizes operations. Â
Add automation features with ease and gauge the impactÂ
Automation is a vital business feature and companies need to focus on delivering excellent automation features to the customers seeking support. These features provide self-serving opportunities, so customers don’t need to wait in the call queues to receive customer support.Â
FreeSWITCH development services can cover building self-serving features by using the telecom stack and features available within this open-source platform. IVR, broadcasting, callback scheduling, etc. are available features that can be added by developers into a contact center solution developed using FreeSWITCH.Â
Read Also: WhyFreeSWITCH Development for Building Telephony Solution?Â
Moreover, FreeSWITCH is a cross platform development platform, which supports different platforms, operating systems, and devices. It also provides an opportunity to add AI driven automation tools into the software such as chatbots to add automation features in addition. Â
Reuse existing infrastructure to build an all-inclusive systemÂ
As mentioned earlier, FreeSWITCH is a cross platform technology. Moreover, it is a highly flexible system. Thus, it supports the integration of any software tool and APIs with the FreeSWITCH based contact center solution. Thus, a FreeSWITCH development company will have the ability to integrate any third-party software and API that a call center uses into the software used for calling. This will help in increasing the reuse of existing infrastructure. Moreover, it also helps in building an all-inclusive system that can be accessed by agents to use all major features of all systems. This integration will also streamline all operations of the software.Â
5. Concluding notesÂ
In a nutshell, the potential of this open-source telephony stack to build a sustainable, secure, robust, scalable, and flexible solution for call centers is tremendous. FreeSWITCH can help in overcoming all challenges faced by any call center to build an ecosystem of technology that offers uninterruptible and quality communication services. It has several characteristics such as modular architecture, platform independence, scalability, and more, which make it a perfect pillar to build a growing call center business.Â
Along with overcoming challenges faced by call centers, FreeSWITCH experts can further help in leveraging various other advantages by harnessing the full potential of this telephony stack. From streamlining operations to adding omnichannel communication, developing a multi-tenant call center solution, and many other milestones can be achieved using this framework to build the best call center software.Â
We are one of the companies that have expertise in using the FreeSWITCH platform to build a custom solution to meet the needs of different industry verticals, including call centers. We help businesses operating in the call center industry with our wide-ranging services with our specialization in FreeSWITCH. To learn more about how we can help you, contact us today!