Contact center software, also referred to as CCaaS or contact center as a service, provides businesses with the capabilities necessary to run a cloud-hosted customer contact center. Founded on traditional, voice-based call center solutions, contact center software enables inbound queueing and routing, outbound dialing, call analytics, and workforce management. However, this type of software goes beyond call center infrastructure to support digital interactions in multiple channels, such as SMS, email, and chat. Common features of the best contact center software include automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), omnichannel support, and computer-telephony integrations (CTI).
Contact center software is commonly used by support teams to staff a help line or by sales teams to handle prospecting. These products integrate with CRM software applications to access customer information and to update customer records with the post-action summaries. They will often integrate with contact center workforce software, speech analytics software, and contact center quality assurance software solutions if the product doesn’t provide that functionality natively. Contact center solutions may also integrate with or include features for unified communications, or UCaaS. Some businesses opt to use virtual receptionist services in place of contact center software.
To qualify for inclusion in the Contact Center category, a product must:
- Offer a cloud-based contact center solution
- Distribute incoming calls and manage phone number assignment for outbound centers
- Provide the infrastructure for call management, placement, and monitoring
- Provide multiple channels (such as voice, SMS, email, chat) for call center representatives to leverage
- Include the following features: automatic call distributor, interactive voice response, queue management, and computer-telephony integrations
- Supply additional features that assist call center operations, such as speech analytics, workforce management, and quality assurance
- Integrate with CRM software or a company’s system of record
