What is contact center technology?

Contact center technology describes a software solution — or a range of tools — used by contact center managers and agents.

Contact center technology solutions include the telephony features you’d expect, like interactive voice response (IVR) and call recording. However, the best solutions include rich omnichannel support, cutting-edge AI and automation, CRM integrations, and powerful call analytics.

These tools aim to meet a variety of contact center use cases. They optimize inbound and outbound communications for sales, IT support, and customer service teams.

They streamline contact center operations, automating agent workflows and boosting productivity. And they deliver the flexibility and scalability needed for long-term success.

Why contact center technology is important

Customers want fast, convenient, personalized, consistent service experiences across their preferred channels.

Traditional PBX (i.e, landline) systems are severely limited. They’re expensive, inflexible, and lack advanced technologies like real-time analytics, intelligent routing, and automation. Foundationally, they’re unable to meet the needs of the modern customer.

Even call center technologies don’t cut it. They only offer native support for voice calls, whereas customers want to receive service on various channels.

In HubSpot’s 2024 State of U.S. consumer trends report, customers voted online live chat support (with a human representative) and AI chatbots as their favorite channels. They also expressed a desire for email, social media, mobile app support, and video support alongside phone calls.

Not only do contact center technologies centralize channels to offer omnichannel support, but they come with sophisticated features that deliver speed, convenience, and personalization to customer service.

They’re also natively scalable and flexible. Agents can be added and removed in just a few clicks, and features can be adapted to meet evolving needs and scaling demands.

Before we discuss the key features of contact center technology architecture, let’s look at the benefits.

What are the benefits of contact center technologies? 

Contact center technology enables businesses to achieve customer service excellence.

Cutting-edge contact center technologies drive operational efficiency and agent productivity. They also provide remote working capabilities and enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Let’s take a closer look at how contact center technology can benefit customer service teams.

Agent productivity and operational efficiency

For even the most seasoned customer service teams, maintaining peak operational performance and agent productivity takes time and effort. Agents can quickly become overburdened with calls, leading to burnout, lost morale, and drained productivity.

Conversely, poor scheduling means agents have nothing to do during off-peak periods. This is dissatisfying and de-motivating for agents (not to mention costly for your business).

Contact center technologies, like workforce management tools and predictive analytics, can forecast call volumes and automate agent scheduling to ensure that you always have the right number of staff on shift to handle calls.

Other customer contact center technology, like AI and automation, removes tedious manual tasks from your agent’s workflows. This allows them to focus on more productive, fulfilling tasks while eliminating human error in their operations, maximizing operational efficiency.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty

In a world where the customer experience is just as important as the products you sell, delivering exceptional customer service is a priority.

Customer contact center technologies empower agents to provide quick, convenient, personalized support that satisfies customers and drives retention and loyalty.

For example, in Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer Report, 61% of customers said they preferred to resolve simple issues with self-service — but if they need to contact a company, 77% expect an immediate response.

Contact center technologies, like AI-powered chatbots, can deliver immediate, 24/7 customer service to every customer who needs it, eliminating the frustration of being stuck in call queues or waiting until working hours to resolve their issue.

You also have technologies like IVR and ACD systems. They work together to intelligently route customers to the right place, leading to fast resolutions with minimal transfers.

These are just some examples of the vast technologies that contact center solutions have to offer to create customer experiences that foster loyalty.

Remote working

McKinsey’s Hybrid Working research reports that 56% of people work on a hybrid schedule, proving that remote work is here to stay for at least a portion of the work week. However, you must have flexible technology for your contact center to make working from home as productive as possible for your agents.

Contact center solutions include omnichannel capabilities that empower agents to connect with customers anywhere on any device. All they need is an internet connection. This promotes a healthier work-life balance, increasing agent satisfaction, happiness, and motivation.

Remote work is good for your business, too. Not only do you have a workforce of happy, motivated agents, but you can hire the best talent from around the globe with minimal costs. There will be no geographical limitations or expensive hardware purchases to hold you back.

Top 10 contact center technology examples

Every contact center platform is different, and each solution will offer a range of technologies. Our Vonage Contact Center features list provides a comprehensive overview of every technology you need. But if you want a run-down of the key features, here’s a top 10 summary of the contact center features to look out for:

1. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) 

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is the key technology powering contact center communications. It enables you to make and receive voice calls, texts, voicemails, and video messages over the internet via a computer, desk phone, smartphone, or other VoIP-enabled devices.

VoIP offers more than just an alternative to traditional landlines. It eliminates outdated telephones and the high costs, inflexibilities, and inefficiencies that come with them.

VoIP converts audio signals into digital data instead of using physical copper wires to transmit calls. This digital data is sent over a secure internet connection to facilitate high-quality voice calling.

Agents can communicate with customers anywhere on any device, improving remote work productivity, agent availability, and customer satisfaction.

And with no need to purchase and maintain expensive legacy hardware, you can enjoy significant cost savings and easy scalability.

2. IVR (Interactive Voice Response) 

Customers become frustrated and dissatisfied when they’re stuck on hold or have to endure multiple transfers. This leads to slow resolutions, high call abandonment rates, and negative customer experiences.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are automated phone systems — essentially virtual receptionists. They greet incoming callers and present them with a menu of phone options (e.g., “Press one for customer service support, press two for sales, or press three for billing.”).

From there, the IVR system intelligently directs the customer to the appropriate department, providing the receiving agent with the context of the call. This reduces wait times, minimizes transfers, and drives faster call resolutions.

Traditionally, IVR systems only used touch-tone technology, which allows callers to interact with the menu via their phone’s keypad. However, modern IVR systems also leverage speech recognition and natural language processing to understand spoken requests.

The best systems can understand expansive dialects, vocabularies, and languages, allowing callers to enjoy a more natural, conversational experience. IVR scripts can be customized for different hours, days, seasons, and special occasions to meet varying customer and business needs.

What’s more, IVR systems can independently resolve a number of customer needs without agent intervention. The most sophisticated systems can retrieve information, take orders, and answer frequently asked questions — all on a 24/7 basis.

Remember when we mentioned that 61% of customers preferred to resolve simple issues with self-service? Well, IVR lets them do this quickly and efficiently, all while reducing call queues for your agents.

3. Video and screen sharing

Video and screen-sharing technologies embedded into contact center platforms empower support agents to diagnose and resolve immediate technical issues without switching solutions.

Screen sharing is a contact center feature that enables customers to share their screens remotely with technical support agents. Agents can visualize — and sometimes even control — customers’ screens to diagnose and troubleshoot issues.

This visual clarity reduces verbal misunderstandings, saves agents from asking many questions, and leads to more accurate diagnostics and faster ticket resolutions.

And then there’s video chat, which brings more personalization and interactivity to customer support.

Video chat allows agents and customers to navigate complex issues more efficiently, speeding up resolutions and improving customer satisfaction. Customers can use visual aids to communicate their problems, and agents can provide live product demonstrations, interactive instructions, and step-by-step guidance.

When video isn’t integrated into your phone system, your agents and customers must download, install, and log in to third-party systems. This is frustrating and time-consuming for both parties, leading to poor agent and customer experiences.

So, opt for a contact center solution like Vonage, which gives you instant access to integrated video calls that you can initiate in a single click from any channel.

4. CRM integration

Of all the contact center integrations you need — point-of-sale systems, analytics, and ecommerce platforms, to name a few — CRM integrations are perhaps the most essential.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems capture critical customer data. Along with demographic details, they store individual purchase histories, previous and ongoing support tickets, brand interactions, product preferences, and a wealth of other invaluable data.

Popular CRMs include HubSpot and Salesforce, but there are a range of industry-specific CRMs that may be more suited to your business.

Integrating your CRM with your contact center synchronizes the data flow between the two systems. As a result, agents can immediately access customer records for every incoming caller without switching between apps, empowering them to deliver consistent, personalized service.

For example, agents can:

• Address customers by their correct name and preferred title

• Use support ticket data to understand the context of the issue and avoid asking repetitive questions

• Make personalized recommendations or offer tailored solutions based on individual needs and preferences

• Automatically log call details into the CRM, reducing manual data entry errors and improving workflows

Choose a contact center solution that offers native integrations with your existing CRM system.

5. Call recording

Call recording is exactly what it sounds like — a technology that records all of your inbound and outbound calls.

Why is this useful? Call recordings can be used to conduct quality assurance, create training materials for new agents, perform on-demand coaching, and help you settle customer disputes.

For example, you can select call recordings that exemplify good and bad call techniques and compile them into a playlist for training sessions. Alternatively, suppose an agent receives low customer satisfaction scores or has above-average call durations. In that case, you can analyze their call recordings to pinpoint the cause of the issue and use your findings to tailor one-on-one coaching sessions.

Vonage’s Contact Center delivers extra value to call recordings with the Conversation Analyzer feature, which uses artificial intelligence and speech analytics to pair call recordings with transcripts and metrics.

It can also analyze recordings to identify non-compliance, gauge customer sentiments, and automatically categorize recordings based on quality.

Call recordings help you understand and improve an agent’s performance and allow you to access deeper insights into your customers’ needs. You can identify common questions, recurring complaints, and lots of other valuable information that can be used to make strategic business decisions.

6. Call analytics

Call analytics technologies are integrated into your contact center software to track top-level key performance indicators (KPIs). Among the capabilities you can find are data displayed in CRM dashboards, speech-to-text transcription, automatic content analysis, and sentiment analysis.

Key metrics can be delivered to your dashboard in real time, enabling live performance monitoring and empowering pivotal, time-sensitive decisions. Historical data can also be compiled into detailed reports for in-depth analysis and forecasting.

Some of the metrics leveraged to conduct call analytics include:

• Call volumes

• Average speed to answer

• Average handle time

• Call abandonment rates

• Call patterns

• First-call response rates

• Customer satisfaction scores

With access to call analytics, you can forecast staffing levels to optimize workflows during peak and off-peak periods. You can also implement strategies to drive performance improvements at exactly the right moment.

On an even deeper level, call analytics can infer customer intent, attribute calls to specific touchpoints, and analyze customer sentiments without needing a specialized data analyst.

7. ACD (Automatic Call Distribution)

An automatic call distributor is contact center technology that automatically distributes inbound calls to specific agents or departments based on your pre-set routing instructions.

ACD systems work alongside your IVR system to ensure that calls are routed to the right place in the first instance. It collects data like the caller ID, the phone number or extension dialed, CRM details, and IVR menu selections to determine where to route the call.

Once an ACD has collected this data, it determines how to route the call based on the rules you’ve set. Here are some examples of how you might route calls:

• Skills-based routing: This routing method infers the reason for the call and directs it to the agent with the most relevant skills or experience.

• Priority-based routing: The ACD triages the issue and moves urgent issues to the top of the queue.

• Business hours and availability routing: The ACD directs the call to the next available agent, considering their business hours and time zone.

• Ring orders: You can set a number of custom ring orders. For example, you might route calls sequentially or send them to the agent with the most idle time. You can set different ring groups for different departments and offices.

The main goal of an ACD system is to help you maintain optimal call center performance. It tracks real-time performance levels, such as call volumes, call queues, and talk time to optimize routing, help you identify and resolve issues, and assist call center efficiency.

8. Omnichannel support

If a customer raises a ticket via email and decides to escalate the issue via phone call, they don’t want to repeat their problem all over again. But without omnichannel capabilities, your customer service agents will have no idea what the customer’s ticket is about.

This results in repetitive questions and back-and-forth app switching as they try to find the customer’s data.

Omnichannel support describes a customer service experience that’s seamless and consistent across channels. Contact centers integrate phone calls, email, messaging apps, social media, live chat, SMS, and more, giving agents access to centralized customer data.

Let’s say that a customer contacts you via your website’s live chat. They provide their details and a description of their issue to an agent who’s unable to resolve the issue on that platform. So, the customer contacts you via phone.

And — thanks to contact center technology — the responding agent will have immediate access to all the information previously submitted by the customer.

Customers don’t have to repeat themselves; agents don’t have to hunt for data in siloed apps. Instead, the agent can resolve the issue, prompting short call durations, speedier resolutions, and improved customer satisfaction.

9. AI and automation 

Of all the latest contact center technology trends, AI and automation have done the most to revolutionize customer communications.

One of the most valuable features is conversational AI, such as chatbots.

AI-powered chatbots simulate human conversation. Using natural language processing and machine learning, they can answer FAQs, schedule and cancel appointments, provide basic information like store opening times or account balances, and transfer customers to agents when necessary.

And the best thing? They can do it on a 24/7 basis, meaning customers can get help whenever they need it.

Automating customer service using chatbots empowers customers to self-service simple issues (and remember, 61% of customers prefer this option). And with your chatbots taking care of the simple stuff, agents can focus on resolving complex issues, which is much more fulfilling.

But it doesn’t end with chatbots. You can automate mundane, repetitive tasks with the right contact center solution.

Here are some examples of AI-powered features:

• Call transcription: Transcribes calls and stores them for your convenience, complete with searchable functionalities. 

• Visual voicemail: Transcribes voicemails and sends the text files directly to your email inbox so you can view them on a screen for easy accessibility.

• Call logging: Automatically inputs call details into CRM systems, eliminating data entry errors and reducing after-call work (ACW) for agents.

• Sentiment analysis: AI analyzes customer sentiments on live calls and automatically notifies supervisors if there’s an issue.

10. Workforce management tools

Managing your workforce is a timely task that can be simplified when workforce management (WFM) functionalities are integrated into your contact center.

Contact center solutions incorporating WFM tools can better allocate people and resources to maintain operational efficiency, meet service-level guarantees, and optimize labor costs.

Using deep analytics like seasonal call volumes, wait times, hold times, and agent availability, WFM tools can provide forecasts that managers can use to optimize staffing levels. It can even automate scheduling to align with demand, drive efficiency, and prevent understaffing and overstaffing.

Another WFM capability is time and attendance tracking. By tracking hours worked, ACW times, absences, and adherence to schedules, contact center managers can identify areas of unproductivity and target them for improvements.

Ultimately, WFM tools help you maintain productive day-to-day operations while reducing operational and labor costs with efficient, accurate scheduling. It ensures that you have the right number of agents on hand at the right time, all with the necessary skills and commitment to deliver first-class customer service.

Transform your customer service with Vonage contact center technology

What’s deemed exceptional customer service today might look very different tomorrow. To sustain long-term operational and customer service excellence, you need an innovative, all-in-one solution that’s scalable and flexible.

Vonage Contact Center has all your cutting-edge features: omnichannel support, innovative AI and automation, powerful integrations, and much more. You can improve your team’s productivity and satisfaction, control costs, boost first-call resolutiions — in short, achieve peak performance and deliver high-quality customer experiences at scale.

Explore what Vonage Contact Center software has to offer today, or get in touch to find out more.