Call Center Management: Agent Features

An Agent’s One-Stop Shop. Service and support agents are much more productive when the information and tools they need to solve customer problems are consolidated in a single spot. That’s the purpose of the agent console inside salesforce.com’s call center software solution. Case details, contract information, customer assets, solutions, opportunities, and orders all appear on a simple, ease-to-use page. By combining this unified desktop view with other call center management features, our call center software solution lets agents reduce the length of calls and increase first-call resolutions.

Call Center Solutions: the Ideal Agent Desktop

In contrast with on-premises call center software, Salesforce CRM turns any Web browser into the ultimate agent desktop. With comprehensive case management tools, a single-click user interface, and seamless computer telephony, your agents can consistently deliver quick answers. Salesforce.com’s call center software solution includes a soft-phone that works with more than 80 telephony platforms, call scripting, click-to-dial, screen-pops, and call logs.

• Computer-telephone integration (CTI) for efficient call center management. The salesforce.com call center solution is integrated with all the leading call distributors and CTI platforms. This integration includes seamless links to both on-premises and cloud-based systems, enabling screen pops of account information or any other desired data stored in Salesforce CRM. By arming agents with relevant information, our call center software solution equips them to solve customer issues in a single interaction, in a personalized, loyalty-enhancing way.
• Three-panel console The Salesforce CRM agent console is a single screen that includes a list view, a case detail view, and a mini view with related information, ensuring that service agents have everything at their fingertips when interacting with customers. With salesforce.com’s call center software solution, agents can perform routine tasks in half the number of clicks and without much navigation.

Call Center Management with a Single Customer View

• No more data silos. Salesforce.com’s call center software solution stores all customer information in a single database, giving agents a full customer history across sales, marketing, and support. Our call center solution easily integrates with other enterprise applications for easy access to relevant data inside these apps. No on-premises call center software system provides this kind of easy, efficient access to a 360-degree customer view.
• Call center solution to spare. Here’s a key Salesforce CRM innovation you won’t find in ordinary call center software: The agent console can automatically present related solutions to help agents quickly deliver in-depth answers for customers. As a result, our call center solution lets even new agents resolve issues as fast as seasoned pros.
• Customer case histories. For a deeper and more thorough understanding of a customer’s interactions with your service organization, salesforce.com’s call center software solution can display complete, at-a-glance case histories in the agent console.
• Customized views. With outdated, on-premises call center software, agent console elements can’t be resized to optimize individual views. Your agents can easily optimize with the Salesforce CRM call center solution, however. Administrators can also design console layouts to include the most helpful supporting information for various business processes.
• Call center management with multichannel integration. To put together a multichannel call center with traditional call center software, you’ll need to interconnect a host of technologies from an array of vendors—a costly, complex, and risky proposition. With salesforce.com’s call center software solution, your agents gain a single integrated platform to deliver consistently outstanding support across all channels, wherever customers turn for service. Today, these channels increasingly include email and the Internet as well as the phone.

Agent Productivity Features for Call Center Management

An integrated, easy-to-use agent console is at the heart of any capable call center solution. But it takes even more to truly optimize your call center. Call center software from salesforce.com also provides:

• Knowledge Management. Our call center software solution makes it easy for agents to tap into company-wide knowledge and expertise. Salesforce CRM’s patented knowledge base technology lets you build a storehouse of the most useful information from all parts of the enterprise, so agents can quickly hone in on the best, most relevant answers to customer questions.
• Up-to-the-minute accuracy. With conventional call center software, search algorithms need expert, continuous modification and recalibration to stay current with the latest data and trends. But with salesforce.com’s call center software solution, knowledge analytics and widgets make it easy to keep your information always up to date.
• Case management. When agents have ready access to all account data, they can provide superior support. Salesforce.com’s call center software solution puts all the details right in front of them, including contact information, customer org charts, the role that contact plays in your business relationship, relevant documents, partners involved in the account, and much more. This breadth of information goes far beyond what conventional call center software provides.
• Agent collaboration. Customers get faster, better answers when they can speak to someone with relevant expertise. Salesforce.com’s call center software solution makes this connection happen with an array of sophisticated queuing tools. Flexible and far-reaching call center management capabilities let individual agents and groups review, escalate, and route customer inquiries to the most appropriate agent or resource.
• Activity management To keep customer satisfaction high, service and support responses don’t just need to be right; they need to be quick. With the call center software solution from salesforce.com, activity management features keep your agents organized and focused on speeding resolutions. Unlike conventional call center software, our call center management solution makes it easy for agents to solve challenging customer issues by identifying and collaborating with other agents and staff.
• Service quality analysis. Salesforce.com’s call center software solution delivers yet another advantage: tools to identify service trends and proactively adapt processes and workflows to the changing needs of your customers and organization. Our call center solution provides a real-time window into operations, with critical metrics such as response times, first-contact resolution rates, and more.
• Agent performance metrics. Optimum call center management includes keeping tabs on agent effectiveness. With the call center software solution from salesforce.com, service managers can monitor agent workload and demand in real time to ensure efficient resource allocation. This proactive insight lets you forestall problems and performance issues that could otherwise impact service quality. The result is support that consistently wows your customers. This result is exactly what you want from a call center solution, but it’s very difficult to achieve with conventional, on-premises call center software.