Cloud PBX Checklist for Large Companies: Call Center

Mike continues his series on the ultimate cloud PBX shopping checklist for large companies, with today’s video covering call center.

Mike explains the difference between ring groups, call center, and contact center, and tells you why it’s important for you to know which of these your company needs, up front.

Want Mike’s recommendations on the best cloud PBX providers to quote for your large company? Click the button below and ask him today.

About Mike

Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

All right, I’m going to continue on my video series for the Cloud PBX checklist for large companies. So I love this video series. It’s all about the discovery questions that I ask customers when they come to me asking me for help on knowing which vendors they should quote for their phone system project. So I wanted to make this list to help you guys out a little bit.

And really so if you have a company that has over a hundred employees, maybe a hundred to maybe about 5,000 employees, and you are in the market for a new phone system, there’s definitely a checklist that you want to go through on the items that you should be asking internally, just inventorying everything that you have to make sure that you quote the right vendors and you can qualify them up front right away so you don’t waste a lot of time quoting vendors that really aren’t the best fit for your organization.

Today’s video is about call center.

Contact me for a free, customized recommendation

But before I get too deep into the video, really quick, if you just want a shortcut and you want to know which Cloud PBX vendors your company should be quoting based on certain requirements, don’t Google it, just reach out and contact me via email or phone (714.593.0011), more information on that at the end of the video.

Ring Groups vs. Call Queues

Okay. So your company is looking for a new phone system and you have a call center. Not all call center offerings are the same with different Cloud PBX vendors so you really want to qualify that down a little bit more. The main thing you want to think about is, is it really a call center? Meaning that, do you just have some call groups or ring groups or hunt groups?

Those are three different terms for the same exact thing, which are a call comes in, and maybe it rings a bunch of phones at the same time until somebody picks up, or maybe a call comes in and it rings a certain group of people sequentially. That’s just a ring group or a hunt group that is not a call queue. A call queue really is what separates call center from non-call center, ring groups and things like that.

What’s a call queue?

A call queue is when a caller calls into your company and they sit on hold while it rings certain people until it finds the person that they’re trying to reach and hooks them up with an agent that’s going to answer the phone. That’s a call queue. And with a call queue, you can see things like average time on hold, things like that. That is more call center.

Also with a call center, you can do things like barge in and listen in on the call. Some people call it whisper mode. Things like that, those are all call center features. If you’re not doing any of that, and you just have a hunt group or a ring group where all calls ring simultaneously and you don’t need a lot of in depth reporting on hold times and stuff like that, then you don’t have a call center, you just have a call group and you don’t have to go down the call center wormhole so to speak.

Call Center vs. Contact Center

Okay. And then after you’ve determined, do you need call center or do you just have hunt groups and you don’t need call center, if you do need call center, you need to dig down even a little bit further. Do you need call center or do you need contact center is how I would term it.

And these are just my terms, but I’ve been working in the industry for over 20 years and I’ve owned this brokerage for over 18 years selling all the major Cloud PBX service providers out there. So my opinion, I kind of know what I’m talking about, but some people term it contact center light versus contact center. I like to term it call center versus contact center. Really, no matter what the differentiating factor to me is whether or not your company needs omnichannel queuing.

What’s the difference?

So do you just have calls coming in, meaning that people are calling in and they’re sitting in queue and you need reporting on that, and maybe you need to have whisper modes so you can train folks and you need to do some recording and stuff like that. That’s all call call center. It’s just calls.

Well, if you want to add in more than just calls, like you want to add in emails into the queue and you want to see how long it’s taking your company to respond to those emails, or maybe a website chat application that you have, how long is it taking you to respond to that website chat, or maybe text messaging coming into the queue, how long is it taking folks to respond to the text messages that are coming in? You want to be able to manage more than just calls in your call queue and see metrics on that and reporting. And maybe you want to use AI to look at customer sentiment. You want to be able to automatically send recordings to call center managers if the call center software detects that a customer’s upset or maybe a customer’s ecstatic about customer service. Things like that really separate call center from contact center or contact center light from contact center.

In Summary

So think about that. So again, just to review, number one, is your company just using hunt groups or call groups, or are you using call center with queuing? If you’re using queuing with people on hold and time on hold and need reporting and all that stuff, do you need just call center or do you need contact center that’s omnichannel or maybe using some type of AI?

So I hope that helps a little bit, but that’s good information to know so that if you know that upfront, you can make sure you tell the service providers right away this is what we need and they’re not finding that out down the road and then saying, “Oh, we can’t do that.” Or “We don’t have something like that.” So it’s good to know what you need right up front, rather than just calling companies at random.

Just do it the easy way and reach out

But again, that’s a lot of work for you, don’t do all that work, just contact me. If you want to know which service providers to quote for this stuff for your company’s Cloud PBX service, if you have a large company, absolutely just call me, reach out, send me an email, give me a call (714.593.0011). I’ll ask you a few questions and based on those questions, I’ll pair you up with the best handful of service providers that you should be quoting for your company, and also introduce you to the right people at those organizations to get your quote [inaudible 00:06:39], oversee the quoting process, do all that stuff for you, and absolutely use me because if you don’t use me, you might end up with a company that’s got a really bad reputation and you could have avoided all that with just one call to me.

The nice thing is if you find something that you like, those service providers pay me my broker fees. So that means you don’t have to pay me anything for my service and my recommendation. So absolutely no excuse. Give me a call, send me an email. I’m happy to help. If this video was helpful, don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel so we can get rid of the advertisements. All right. I will catch you on the next one.