Many call center software features have no major impact on performance. Only a select few capabilities separate top vendors from the rest, and those are the ones to focus on.
In this guide, we’ll break down the five essential features that define effective call center software — covering everything from must-have communication tools to analytics that drive real insights.
We’ll also give you a clear framework to evaluate each feature, helping you cut through the hype and find the capabilities that will elevate your customer service. Whether you’re upgrading or starting fresh, understanding these features will help you make the right choice.
1. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
A basic IVR is essentially a phone tree that provides customers with an automated menu of options. Call center IVRs tend to be a little more advanced in their capabilities, and are typically connected to a database and allow customers to complete a range of tasks on their own.
At the very least, an IVR is responsible for intaking calls and routing them to the appropriate agent. On the more advanced end, IVR systems allow customers to make payments, change their address, or transfer them seamlessly to another channel.
How does a call center IVR work?
Basic IVRs rely on DTMF tones (touch-tone inputs), while more advanced systems incorporate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to process spoken responses. Some also use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand intent. Text-to-speech (TTS) technology is used to generate spoken responses for dynamic content, like account balances or payment confirmations.
SEE: Discover seven surprising use cases for call center ASR.
When choosing a system, businesses must decide between on-premise and cloud IVR solutions. On-premise IVRs run on internal servers, giving companies greater control over customization and data security.
On-premises IVR systems cost a lot more upfront than cloud IVR, and come with significant ongoing maintenance and testing expenditures.
Hosted IVRs are managed by the vendor and offer flexibility to scale as call volumes fluctuate. Updates and maintenance are baked into the cost of the subscription service. Cloud solutions also tend to be more budget-friendly and are popular with companies that want a reliable system without the demands of infrastructure management.
SEE: Nine reasons to use a hosted IVR vs hosting your own.
What are the expectations for call center IVR?
At a minimum, an IVR should reduce the friction of interacting with your customer support and reduce unnecessary wait times that result from live agents answering customer inquiries.
Its implementation should also boost call management and associated call center metrics, such as call abandonment rates, first contact resolution, and first response times.
Additional features that typically accompany a self-service IVR are omnichannel capabilities so customers can conveniently reach your call center through various means and on different platforms.
An IVR self-service system improves customer experience and agent productivity while reducing costs.
On the premium end, conversational IVR can interpret and respond to unique customer inquiries rather than reiterate recorded messages.
See: Discover real-world benefits of using conversational IVR.
2. CRM integration
Customer Relationship Management software has to integrate with your call center software. Maybe you are using a sales engagement platform or something other than a CRM — fine — whatever you use to keep track of customers needs to be connected to the phones.
Don’t have a CRM? See how to pick the best CRM for your call center.
How does a CRM integration work for call centers?
For the most part, call center software will advertise pre-built integrations, SDKs, and APIs that allow companies to integrate their CRM software with the phone system.
How well do these CRM integrations work? It depends on a ton of factors. The more you have customized your own system, the less plug-and-play the integration is going to be.
Integrating your call center and CRM is going to take some time, regardless of how well any pre-built integration has been designed. More than any other call center feature, this is the one you should spend the time to do the live demo and get recommendations from peers in your industry.
What are the expectations for call center CRM integration?
Integrating CRM functionality with your call center software enables you to build strong customer bonds and relationships. When your agents receive a customer’s call, CRMs provide them with detailed background information related to them so they can provide personalized support.
For high-volume call centers, the expectation is that CRMs will do more than just display customer information to agents. Companies want to see the IVR be able to prioritize calls from VIPs, distribute calls efficiently based on agent skills and customer needs, and set up call queues for outbound IVR based on customer data.
Premium CRM software may include marketing automation, workflow automation, predictive analysis, and machine learning capabilities.
For contact centers, multi-channel integration ensures you can provide customers with a consistent, quality support experience regardless of the avenue or channel they choose to reach you.
3. Call center analytics
Call center analytics empowers you to improve your call center’s operational efficiency. It allows you to collect relevant call center data, measure it, and analyze it, thereby gaining valuable insights to improve the performance of critical areas.
Call center analytics ensures you aren’t flying blind regarding your agents’ performance, the quality of their customer interactions, and their overall output.
How does call center analytics work?
Call center analytics work effectively by measuring established metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Some of these include Average Handle Time (AHT), abandonment rate, and First Contact Resolution (FCR). These metrics provide vital information to managers, helping them offer high-quality customer service, improve team performance, and streamline call flows.
What are the expectations for call center analytics?
Managers expect analytics to enable data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement in service quality.
Typically, call center software includes analytics dashboards and real-time reporting features, which provide managers with immediate insights into call center activity. This enables quick adjustments in staffing or call routing when demand spikes, reducing customer wait times.
Many systems also track quality assurance metrics by recording and analyzing call samples for compliance and customer service standards.
See: Learn about the most important call center quality assurance best practices.
Premium analytics features include predictive modeling to anticipate call volume and staff accordingly. You may also see speech analytics tools that gauge caller sentiment and identify common issues. These analytics allow companies to personalize customer experiences, improve response times, and streamline call-handling processes
The integration of artificial intelligence with call center software enhances these analytic capabilities, allowing for quicker data analysis and actionable insights. For example, AI can quickly transcribe and analyze calls, identifying keywords and emotional cues that highlight potential pain points.
4. Call coaching
Call coaching refers to a set of features designed for supervisors to help new hires learn the difficult art of call center work. Whether it’s sales, service, or something else, better coaching is one of the best tools for employers to respond to the rampant burnout in call centers and better support their employees.
See: Discover the most pressing causes of burnout and how to fix them.
How does call coaching work?
The most commonly used coaching feature is “whisper” mode, which allows a supervisor to speak to the agent directly without the customer hearing. They can help struggling agents by whispering advice, providing procedural information, or correcting errors on the spot. Managers can use whisper mode for discrete guidance to maintain the flow of the call without disrupting the customer experience
Another common coaching feature is “barge,” which allows a manager to join the call if the situation escalates, or if the agent needs additional support that can’t be provided through whispering. Barge is helpful for sensitive or complex interactions where a supervisor’s presence can help resolve an issue faster, or if a high-value customer requires immediate managerial assistance.
The next two call center software features are not coaching specific, but play a big role in both coaching and training.
Call center quality monitoring enables managers to listen in on calls without intervening, which helps evaluate agent performance and assess how well agents follow scripts and handle objections.
Call recording is invaluable for call center training, agent productivity, and development. New hires often listen to “good” and “bad” call examples as part of onboarding. These tools collectively enhance coaching by giving managers flexible control to improve call quality and address skill gaps in real-time
What are the expectations for call coaching features?
On one end, some managers really just want call recordings and call monitoring. They don’t have the drive or the bandwidth to devote the one-on-one time necessary to get value from using features like barge and whisper.
At the other end of the spectrum are hands-on managers and supervisors that want to help agents succeed. They are going to expect to be able to listen in on calls, take advantage of the whisper feature, and help new reps build confidence on the phone.
Premium call center software features may include automated coaching tools. These AI-driven solutions analyze call data to identify performance patterns and deliver personalized feedback to reps during the call. This is supposed to streamline the coaching process and ensure consistency of service. It sounds good in theory, but I have yet to use these tools as of writing this post.
As a buyer of call center software, I’d be keen to survey managers and supervisors to figure out whether this feature is something they would lean into, or whether we can get by with call recording and monitoring for coaching purposes.
5. Sentiment analysis
This call center software feature gauges emotions during customer interactions. While we’ve hinted at this topic area while talking about analytics, call center sentiment analysis has come a long way in the last few years. The power of the technology has gone up, the cost has come down, and more and more call centers are able to use it.
How does call center sentiment analysis work?
This technology uses automated speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to interpret the words spoken, as well as the emotions conveyed through tone, pitch, and even pauses. Sentiment analysis can identify whether interactions are positive, negative, or neutral.
This data is invaluable for managers who have to review customer calls at scale. It takes no time to quickly surface and analyze calls with negative sentiment. Without automated sentiment analysis, every call would have to be gone through by hand.
Besides gauging customer sentiment, speech analysis is integral for evaluating new products and services. It can help judge whether there’s a genuine interest in an offer or whether the prospect is merely being polite without honestly expressing the intention to purchase.
What are the expectations of call center software with speech analytics?
At a basic level, businesses expect it to enhance customer experience by quickly identifying when customers express frustration or satisfaction. This allows agents to respond more effectively, addressing concerns before they escalate.
More advanced systems include real-time analytics that can assist agents during calls, providing insights that enable them to modify their approach based on detected emotional shifts. Insights from sentiment analysis may appear as in-app notifications to the agent, or from an agent assistant chatbot.
See: Discover five powerful call center chatbot examples.
Finding the right set of call center software features
If you are shopping around, the single best thing you can do is understand ahead of time exactly which call center software features you need.
You can do this by talking to everyone at your company who has a stake in the new software. That starts with the heads of teams and departments that are going to be using the software — like sales, service, or help desk — but also includes billing, HR, legal, and of course, IT.
Call recording laws, data privacy regulations, payment gateways, firewalls — all of these things will play a role in the exact set of features you need for call center software.
If you don’t figure out your needs up front, it’s going to cause delays in deployment and add unnecessary costs. Finding out early that one department needs fax or uses their own CRM is so much better than finding this out when you have already created a shortlist of (what you thought was) viable call center software.
It sounds really obvious, but if you are not thorough in your initial assessment, you are going to be pricing out the wrong call center software features and creating problems down the line.