Contact Center Workforce reviews by real, verified users. Find unbiased ratings on user satisfaction, features, and price based on the most reviews available anywhere.
Best Contact Center Workforce Software for Small Businesses
Top 6 Contact Center Workforce Software for Small Businesses
- NICE inContact
- Dixa
- Five9
- CloudTalk
- JustCall
- Contact Center
NICE inContact is the cloud contact center software leader with the world’s #1 cloud customer experience platform. NICE inContact CXone™ combines best-in-class Omnichannel Routing, Analytics, Workforce Optimization, Automation and Artificial Intelligence on an Open Cloud Foundation. NICE inContact’s solution empowers organizations to provide exceptional customer experiences by acting smarter and responding faster to consumer expectations. NICE inContact’s DEVone developer program is an extensive
Dixa is customer service software that empowers brands to create great experiences for customers and support teams alike in a conversational, friendly, and engaging way. Dixa unifies voice, email, chat, and messaging apps in one single platform, enabling brands to have more meaningful conversations with their customers, driving customer loyalty, and ultimately “customer friendships.” With Dixa, agents have all the context they need to provide fast, efficient, and effective customer service every
Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact center software, bringing the power of the cloud to more than 2,000 customers worldwide and facilitating more than five billion call minutes annually. Since 2001, Five9 has led the cloud revolution in contact centers, delivering software to help organizations of every size transition from premise-based software to the cloud. For more information visit www.five9.com.
CloudTalk is user-friendly cloud-based phone software for sales and support teams. It is used by startups, scale-ups, SMEs or eCommerce to improve customer experiences and team performance. To achieve this, CloudTalk provides more than 50 advanced calling features. Thanks to seamless integration with the favourite tools (such a CRM, Helpdesk, or e-commerce platforms, etc.), CloudTalk helps companies deliver first-class customer experiences, resulting in the growth of their profitably. Cloudtalk
JustCall is a cloud phone system for sales, support, and report teams. It allows you to create a call center for your sales teams and contact center for your support teams. Along with business phone system features, JustCall also comes with a number of workflow automation features around SMS and Phone Calls. JustCall currently integrates natively with 40+ Business Tools (CRM, Helpdesk, etc). JustCall automatically logs following activities in your business tools to save your reps from manually
8x8 Contact Center is designed to enable any business to deliver a positive customer experience with a complete multi-channel solution and extensive customer analytics. 8x8 includes interoperable team messaging as a native entitlement to enhance customer service, removing corporate silos that prevent information sharing and degrade customer support. Also included with each agent license is integration with major CRM applications and an Open API for extended third party system connectivity. Key f
Learn More About Contact Center Workforce Software
What is Contact Center Workforce Software?
Contact center workforce software is a workforce management technology designed specifically for customer service teams, call centers, and contact centers. While call centers focus exclusively on inbound and outbound voice calls, contact centers and service teams also use other communications channels such as email or text messaging. Contact center workforce software allows companies to manage a diverse workforce with various qualifications and experience levels with one or more of the channels mentioned above. This type of software is mostly beneficial to companies with large teams that are using obsolete technology to manage and track their workforce. Its main focus is employee scheduling, planning, and monitoring, which can help increase agent productivity and performance.
Key Benefits of Contact Center Workforce Software
- Optimize the call center workforce
- Reduce operational costs
- Track contact center agent performance
Why Use Contact Center Workforce Software?
Contact centers sometimes employ hundreds or thousands of people, making it difficult for managers to plan and assign shifts. Furthermore, many contact center employees work part-time and have limited availability; resources like workstations are limited, and contact centers need to find the best way to satisfy demand despite the constraints mentioned above.
Planning and scheduling — Contact centers need to constantly adapt to the changing needs of their customers through flexible planning and by scheduling resources based on their availability.
Improve customer satisfaction — Customers expect the best quality at reasonable costs, which can only be achieved when agents are properly trained and engaged and idle times are reduced as much as possible.
Support employees — Agents are the most important asset of a call center, which is why companies need to ensure that they are engaged at work, which makes them more productive and loyal.
Who Uses Contact Center Workforce Software?
All employees of a contact center benefit from using this type of software. Depending on their role, employees use different modules of the software, as described below.
HR employees — HR professionals create strategies to optimize the workforce and monitor labor costs. They follow trends such as employee turnover and agent performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
Supervisors — Shift supervisors take a more hands-on approach to planning and scheduling. They define and implement short term schedules and are responsible for making last-minute changes when resource availability changes. Supervisors also train and coach agents and monitor the quality of their work.
Executives — Managers and executives use the analytics modules of this type of software to track costs, performance, and customer satisfaction. Executives are also involved in contract negotiations with customers and need to estimate if the company is able to deliver on its promise.
Agents — Contact center agents use this type of software to share their availability and preferred shifts with supervisors. After shifts are assigned, agents can see when they are supposed to work and for how long. At the end of each shift, agents enter the time worked on each project and task.
Kinds of Contact Center Workforce Software
Contact center platforms — Platforms include functionality and modules for all or most contact center activities and do not focus exclusively on workforce management. Workforce management is delivered as a module or a standalone product part of a suite. This option provides better integration between workforce management software and solutions for operations, but is also costly because of its complexity.
Best-of-breed software — This type of software only provides features for contact center workforce management. It is a good option for companies that already use other software solutions for contact center operations.
Contact Center Workforce Software Features
This type of software includes standard workforce management features such as workforce planning and functionality specific to contact centers, such as intraday management. Contact center workforce software products cover the functions mentioned below, and advanced features are available through integration with other solutions.
Agent availability — Many contact center agents work part-time, which means that they are only available a few days per week. Also, since contact centers may have customers in multiple time zones, they need agents available in the evening and on the weekends. Finally, call centers may have multiple locations in different countries and may allocate resources from multiple teams to the same project. It is therefore critical that companies have complete visibility into the availability of all of their agents.
Shift planning — Managers and supervisors assign agents and physical resources to tasks based on their availability and the requirements of their customers. Planning should consider labor regulations related to the maximum time worked by day or week, breaks, and time off.
Workforce scheduling — Shift planning is the starting point for workforce schedules, but unexpected changes may force supervisors to review scheduling. For instance, customers may require additional work, or agents may have to work additional hours when targets aren't achieved on time. All these changes should be reflected in the work schedules so that supervisors are able to communicate with agents to let them know when they're supposed to work and for how long.
Intraday management — Intraday features ensure that agents adhere to the daily schedule and perform as expected. This functionality rebalances each day’s workload to ensure that there are enough resources to comply with service level agreements (SLAs). Depending on their role and experience, agents are expected to perform within predefined parameters such as the minimum number of calls per hour or average time per call. Consistently low-performance levels may indicate that agents are not motivated or require additional training.
Forecasting — Using historical data, companies create forecasts for future demand and estimate the resources required to fulfill it. Forecasting also considers potential risks that may impact the company's ability to deliver services on time and budget.
Performance analysis — Agent performance is tracked by monitoring multiple factors such as the number of calls performed, the time spent per call, and the quality of their work. Agent performance is evaluated at regular intervals, such as monthly and quarterly. Supervisors may also listen to calls without warning and intervene when required. Supervisor performance is evaluated based on their team's work and their ability to solve unexpected issues such as workforce shortages and dealing with aggressive customers.
Cost tracking — Labor represents the most significant cost of a call center, which is why companies need to monitor all the hours worked by agents. Since time tracking functionality isn't always included in contact center workforce software, this type of software integrates with other systems to import labor data.
Service levels — While contact centers have internal quality standards, many customers have SLAs that need to be respected. SLAs are usually a contractual obligation, and contact centers that do not comply may have to pay penalties or get sued.
Additional Contact Center Workforce Software Features
Workforce optimization — Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, companies identify agents that are more likely to underperform and assign them to less critical tasks. Intelligent technology may also estimate the likelihood of disruptions like bottlenecks, such as when there are more available agents than workstations.
Potential Issues with Contact Center Workforce Software
Integration — This type of software generates a lot of business data such as time tracking, which needs to be transferred to other systems such as HR, payroll, and accounting. This ensures that agents and supervisors are paid accurately, based on their role and work volume. Integration with HR systems also helps companies monitor time off, vacation, and benefits.
Compliance — Contact centers need to comply with privacy regulations such as the U.S. National Do Not Call Registry. The software also has to protect private data from hackers and unauthorized access by users. Since privacy regulations vary significantly from one country to another or by state or city, software providers may not always be up to date with the latest changes in compliance.
