How Technology Keeps Call Centers Humming Along

While you might think that call centers run on human agents, you’d be wrong. While the teams of agents who speak with callers are what answer their queries, it’s the technology behind the scenes that keep call centers humming.

Let’s learn about some of the technological systems being employed at call centers across the country.

Auto Call Distribution

The auto call distribution (ACD) system answers an incoming call, determines which customer agent should receive the call and routes it to that person. Automatic handling of calls and call routing reduces or eliminates the need for an operator. Furthermore, with calls going to the correct teams or individuals, customer agents don’t waste time redirecting calls and customers don’t feel like they’re being bounced around.

This type of ACD system is what allows call centers like Humach to deal effectively with a flood of calls without them jamming up the switchboard or directing calls to the wrong team or person.

VoIP Call Center Recording Systems

With the switch to digital and VoIP calls in and out, call centers are run by computers that digitize the call audio making it easier to be stored. Every call is recorded and digitally stored for a permanent record of the call history. What used to be something that only existed when calling 911 in an emergency is now one of the most used computer technologies of all.

Advancements in audio codecs have allowed for file compression in either a lossless or lossy state. Lossless means that the digital audio recording doesn’t suffer any reduction of audio quality during the file compression process. System managers decide which audio format makes the most sense to balance audio quality vs storage requirements based on the volume of calls and average call duration per day.

Modern recording systems allow managers to access live calls on their headset now. They can also listen back to a live call from when it began several minutes ago and speed up the playback to get current faster when dealing with a problem call.

Interactive Voice Response

The familiar interactive voice response (IVR) systems take incoming calls and move callers through a computerized response protocol. Callers can listen to a list of choices such as the action they wish to take or the department they want to speak to. This can be completed using a keypad or verbally to confirm their choices.

These IVR systems have gotten smarter over the years. They now understand the spoken word including subtle but important grammatical differences and a wider vocabulary as well. Regional dialects trip up IVR system less often now too. These systems also learn based on customer interactions to improve their level of understanding.

Whether managing increased call volume during peak periods, examining call analytics to confirm the average call duration, or using voice response to reduce the need for human operators, technology is at the forefront of what drives efficient call center operations. Without it, call centers simply couldn’t handle the huge volume of incoming calls.