What is Call Center Technology? Top Trends & Providers

Call center technology affects every aspect of day-to-day business operations–and can make or break your call center’s success. The hardware you choose influences call quality and network reliability, while your selected software impacts customer satisfaction, agent engagement, productivity, and profitability.

This article covers established and new call center technology, emerging trends, and the best call center software providers.

• Overview
• Key Technologies
• AI-Powered Technology
• Emerging Trends
• Top Providers

• FAQs

What Is Call Center Technology? 

Call center technology is the group of hardware and software solutions used to facilitate internal and customer-facing communication, workflows, and all other business processes at your call center. These technologies work together to increase call center productivity, lower operating costs, optimize agent performance, and improve the customer experience.

Standard call center technologies include softphones, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call routing, third-party integrations and CTI, analytics and reporting, outbound dialers, and team collaboration tools like chat and video calling. Advanced AI-powered technologies like workforce management, Agent Assist, and post-call summaries are increasingly common, but usually available only on more expensive plans. Call center equipment like desk phones, headsets, conference room hardware, and VoIP routers also fall under the umbrella of call center technology.

Depending on your call center’s goals, size, and customer base, you may need all or some of these technologies. To avoid constant app switching and communication silos, most businesses purchase their call center technology from a single SaaS provider, integrating compatible hardware and third-party applications.

What Are Key Call Center Technologies?

Today’s business phone systems offer a combination of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call management tools and unified communication call center technologies. Feature availability varies by plan and provider, but the below capabilities are general considered standard:

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Call Center IVR (Interactive Voice Response) automatically directs customers to the right agent or department by playing pre-recorded call menu prompts to all inbound callers.

Callers are guided through editable call flows based on their spoken or touch tone responses, eliminating manual call transfers and ensuring callers are connected to the best available agent to meet specific customer needs. IVR systems can also guide callers through basic support interactions like account balance or order updates and appointment confirmations.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is a feature that routes incoming calls to the agent or department best suited to handle the inquiry.

The ideal call path is chosen based on predetermined criteria and routing strategies. Popular routing options include skills-based routing, idle routing, round-robin routing, time-based routing, and even VIP client status.

Call Queuing

Call queueing systems automatically route calls to the ideal queue based on their IVR input or the phone number dialed. Callers wait in these queues for an available agent.

Hold messages and music, estimated call wait times or queue place updates, and the option to schedule an automated callback are also part of the call queueing process.

Call Recording and Transcription 

Call recording is a standard call center feature that records phone calls (or video calls) either automatically or on-demand. Call transcription transcribes these calls in real-time or immediately after the call has ended.

Outbound Auto Dialer

Outbound auto dialers eliminate manual dialing by automatically dialing lead list phone numbers according to preset rules and dialing modes.

Users choose from several types of auto dialers: progressive, predictive, preview, and power dialers speed up lead list penetration and streamline marketing campaigns. Most auto dialers also include features like automatic lead list generation and scrubbing, voicemail drop, outbound IVR, and TCPA compliance.

Analytics and Reporting

Historical and real-time analytics tools monitor specific KPIs, call logs, agent presence, and inbound/outbound call volumes to identify call center activity trends.

Users can monitor call center metrics like average call duration, call abandonment rate,  first call resolution, daily or agent daily call volume, CSAT, call quality, customer retention rates, and more.

Quality call center providers also offer pre-made or customizable report templates and automatically send out new reports at preset intervals.

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) refers to the technology that empowers computers to interact with your phone system and other communication channels, such as texting, social media, and live chat.

CTI technology also powers in-call screen pops from integrated third-party tools like helpdesk solutions and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems.

Workforce Management

Workforce Management (WFM) is a call and contact center technology that automates agent schedules via forecasting, monitors agent performance, and identifies ways to optimize existing workflows.

Forecasting uses predictive analytics to create ideal agent schedules and staffing strategies based on customizable conditions and historical reports. It also ensures each shift contains agents with a variety of skill sets. Agent-facing tools like PTO management, shift bidding, and shift swapping streamline the scheduling process. Adherence monitoring and automatic schedule adjustments evenly distribute workloads and reduce agent absenteeism.

Unified Communications and Collaboration

Unified communications technology improves internal collaboration between agents and departments through features like team chat messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing, file sharing, and whiteboards.

Omnichannel Engagement

In addition to voice calling and SMS text messaging, some call center technology includes additional communication channels like website chat, social media messaging, video conferencing with agent-customer screen share, and online faxing. All these voice and digital channels are streamlined in a single interface, enabling seamless omnichannel customer engagement.

Call Center Hardware

Call centers can use existing compatible hardware to keep costs down, purchase new hardware directly from providers, or rent equipment via Device as a Service subscriptions.

Common call center equipment includes desk and mobile phones, desktop and laptop computers, headsets, VoIP ATAs, VoIP routers, PoE adapters, and ethernet cables. Before installing and implementing hardware, ensure your internet connection has a minimum bandwidth of 100kbps per line to power VoIP technology.

AI-Powered Call Center Technology

In addition to the standard call center technology covered above, recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence have led to an influx of AI-powered features like Agent Assist, post-call summaries, conversation analytics, and agent coaching. Let’s take a closer look at how these capabilities help streamline call center operations, pinpoint the root causes of common problems, and improve agent performance.

Agent Assist

Agent Assist integrates with your internal knowledge base and CRM systems to provide real-time, next-best-action suggestions to agents during customer conversations. Using Natural Language Understanding, Agent Assist takes conversational context and customer data into account when providing suggestions. Often, Agent Assist technology also includes live conversation transcription.

65% of agents say they want AI-powered in-conversation support from call center technology like Agent Assist.[*]

Agent Assist eliminates excessive app switching, increases first call resolution rates, and ensures agents provide the best possible customer service. It also decreases agent burnout, shortens average handle times, and improves operational efficiency in your call center.

Post-Call Summaries

Post-call summaries eliminate manual post-call work by automatically creating summaries of customer interactions. These AI-powered summaries often also include customer sentiment details, CSAT scores, agent performance ratings, and suggested follow-up tasks.

Automated post-call summaries don’t just eliminate the kind of busy work that causes low agent engagement–they also save each agent roughly 3 hours per week.[*] Post-meeting summaries provide the same insights as post-call summaries, but for video meetings.

Conversation Analytics

Conversation analytics (also called speech and text analytics) leverage Natural Language Processing and machine learning to analyze 100% of customer interactions across voice and digital channels.

Unlike standard call center analytics, which focus on specific KPIs, conversation analytics uncover trends in customer sentiment and intent, customer feedback, and agent performance. Speech and text analytics offer template-based and custom reports, real-time KPI alerts, word clouds illustrating common keywords in customer conversations, and other insights that help contact center managers address the root causes of customer issues.

Agent Coaching

In the past, call center managers had to make do with standard quality management technology like call monitoring, call whisper, and call recordings.

Now, call center software offers advanced agent coaching tools like customizable agent scorecards, manual or AI-powered in-call coaching via chat messaging, and automated post-call scoring. Managers can automatically assign agents relevant training modules based on scores, add notes to agent scoresheets, and use call center performance analytics to track agent progress.

Emerging Call Center Technology Trends

The AI-powered call center technology covered above may have been revolutionary just a year or two ago, but now that many of these features are standard, new trends have arrived.

Agent engagement, Generative AI, voicebots, personalized reports for supervisors, and reputation management are all popular call center technology trends shaping customer communication and the agent experience.

Agent Engagement 

Engaged call center agents are 18% more productive than their disengaged colleagues, more likely to stay at their jobs, and provide higher quality customer service[*]. Unfortunately, 59% of contact center agents report being somewhat or highly disengaged–leading to a renewed focus on agent engagement technology.[*]

Popular agent productivity and engagement features include real-time wallboards, performance gamification, employee rewards and recognition programs, and personalized agent coaching from managers.

Team collaboration tools also improve agent engagement rates, fostering a sense of accountability and community. Self-assessments, anonymous employee surveys, and flexible scheduling options further improve the employee experience, increasing agent retention and CSAT scores.

Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is quickly becoming an essential call center technology. It uses machine learning, purpose-built model training, historical analytics, and integrated company resources to generate content and ideas.

Providers like Zoom and NICE CXone are leveraging GenAI to create knowledge base content, FAQs, email and chat message responses, project proposals and other documents, blog posts, social media content, and to catch up meeting or conference call latecomers on what they missed.

GenAI can craft personalized, real-time responses for agents that take conversational context, customer intent, and internal documentation into account. It’s also used for automated note-taking, interaction summaries, and to create agent training scenarios that mimic customer conversations.

IVA Voicebots 

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) use Natural Language Understanding and Conversational AI to provide personalized, highly-accurate bot-based customer service that only improves over time. While IVA-powered chatbots have been the norm for a while, contact center solutions are now bringing their capabilities to voice.

Voicebots provide superior customer self-service options via phone and, unlike standard IVR, often complete entire interactions without involving a live agent. In addition to customer support, these voicebots can automate a huge percentage of outbound sales calls and follow-ups. Today’s voicebots have two-way, natural-sounding conversations with prospects in real-time–and they’re so accurate, customers often don’t realize they’re speaking to a bot.

Call centers use voicebots from providers like Freshworks and Genesys  to automatically qualify leads, schedule or update appointments, and make product recommendations.

Personalized Reporting for Supervisors

Conversation analytics and standard reporting tools create interactive reports that can be drilled down to individual KPIs and specific time periods or agents. While these reports contain valuable insights, reading and interpreting all that data is time-consuming and overwhelming.

The solution?

Personalized supervisor reports powered by a combination of conversation analytics and Generative AI. Instead of manually combing through reports, supervisors can type specific questions into a chatbox and receive GenAI summary responses and relevant data.

As shown in this example from NICE Enlighten Actions, a supervisor could ask what the top ten reasons for customer calls are, specify how they want the data displayed, and ask additional clarifying questions.

Reputation Management

63% of your business’s market value is determined by its reputation–making staying on top of what customers write about you online or tell family and friends is essential.[*]

Recently, providers like Nextiva have added numerous reputation management (and, as the two go hand-in-hand, social media management) features to their products. Reputation management capabilities include real-time alerts for new reviews, integration with popular social media channels and review websites, and the ability to respond to reviews. Reviews from multiple channels are streamlined into a unified inbox, where agents can turn them into support tickets or assign conversations to agents.

Reputation management tools let call center representatives respond to customers directly, give managers deep insight into the reasons for current CSAT and NPS scores, and even track company and competitor mentions via social listening.

Power Your Call Center with the Right Technology

Leveraging the right call center technology helps your business provide better customer service, shorten sales cycles, and optimize everyday business processes. The latest trends in call center technology reflect an increased reliance on AI-powered automation and a renewed focus on agent engagement.

The call center software providers in the table below offer scalable solutions, several compatible hardware options, and AI-powered capabilities to take your business to the next level.

FAQs

Below, we’ve answered some of the most common questions about call center technology and software.