Call center infrastructure (CCI), also known as contact center infrastructure, provides solutions required to establish and operate a call center. CCI software helps businesses create an efficient call or contact center to help them stay connected with their customers. CCI is most commonly used by customer-facing teams to manage inbound and outbound communications, but it also includes features for managing operations or back-office tasks like workflow management, employee monitoring, and measuring productivity.
While historically CCI was designed to be deployed on premises, emerging technologies in cloud infrastructure have allowed for the design and deployment of cloud call centers. The products in this category offer a full-fledged cloud-hosted infrastructure solution with features like call routing, call recording and monitoring, automatic call distribution (ACD), and interactive voice response (IVR). Local area network (LAN) and VoIP providers are examples of some software providers that also offer solutions to establish infrastructure for network connectivity of contact centers. Depending on the provider and the membership plan, a variety of other features may be available in a CCI package. CCI products frequently integrate with CRM software.
To qualify for inclusion in the Call Center Infrastructure (CCI) category, a product must:
- Distribute incoming calls or manage phone number assignment for outbound centers
- Manage and store data related to calls, customers, and agents
- Provide a comprehensive infrastructure solution which includes call management, placement, routing, recording, and analytics
- Enable managers to track and monitor calls
- Include the following features: automatic call distributor, universal communications, interactive voice response, universal queue management, and computer telephony integrations (CTI)
