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In this guide, we’ll explore the essential elements for mastering outbound calling in your call centre.

What Are Outbound Calls?

Understanding the different types of outbound calls before turning your attention to strategy is crucial. The various objectives behind outbound calling initiatives are important to consider:

1. Sales and Lead Generation: The bread and butter of outbound efforts are often sales calls and lead qualification, whether it’s cold calling for new business or upselling/cross-selling to existing customers.
2. Market Research: Outbound surveys provide invaluable market intelligence, gathering insights into consumer behaviour, product feedback, and industry trends.
3. Customer Experience: Proactive outreach can enhance the customer experience by addressing issues before they escalate and gauging satisfaction through post-transaction surveys.

While the specific goals may differ depending on use cases, successful outbound strategies share a common foundation: aligning the right tactics to your unique business needs.

What Can a Strong Outbound Calling Strategy Achieve?

A well-planned outbound strategy, coupled with the right technology, can significantly benefit your business:

Optimising Call Centre Technology: Inbound vs. Outbound

While the right technology is crucial for both inbound and outbound calls, their needs differ. Inbound centres focus on agent workflow and empowering customers (think IVR and call routing). Outbound centres prioritise lead generation and call efficiency (think predictive dialers and ACD). For centres handling both, a comprehensive, integrated solution is key.

Make Outbound Calling Successful with Powerful Technology

We’ve established that the right contact centre software is make or break when it comes to outbound calling. But which features and capabilities should you prioritise if you’re looking to boost results of your outbound campaigns?  

Auto Diallers: Boost agent productivity with an outbound dialler that connects them directly to live prospects, eliminating wasted time on unanswered calls.

Call Recording: Use call recordings to identify coaching opportunities and help agents refine their communication skills and objection handling techniques.

CRM Integration: Painless CRM integration provides agents with a centralised view of customer information, enabling personalised conversations and stronger relationships.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD): Intelligent call routing means every call is directed to the most qualified agent based on skills, language proficiency, and availability.

Answer Machine Detection (AMD): Avoid wasted time on answering machines by using AMD technology to identify and skip over voicemails.

Dynamic Call Scripting: Empower agents with flexible, interactive call scripts that can adapt to each conversation while maintaining consistency and accurate data capture.

Outbound Skills-Based Routing: Match customers with agents who possess the most relevant expertise, encouraging rapport and efficient resolution.

Data Management: Use data segmentation tools to target the right audience and prioritise contacts most likely to convert, optimising your outreach efforts.

Outbound Calling Best Practices

When it comes to outbound activity, utilising the right technology alone isn’t enough. Successful outbound strategies also rest on implementing proven best practices:

1. Planning and Preparation

• Clearly define campaign objectives and target your call lists to match.
• Develop call scripts that act as flexible conversation guides, not rigid scripts.
• Ensure compliance with relevant regulations, such as obtaining necessary consent.

2. Agent Skills and Training

• Refine agents’ communication abilities, focusing on active listening, empathy, and objection handling.
• For sales campaigns, provide comprehensive product knowledge training.

Measuring Your Outbound Calling Performance

Measuring the success of outbound calling must look beyond the number of calls made. Tracking relevant KPIs helps you to achieve two things. Firstly, it gives you valuable insights that enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. Secondly, it empowers you to make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

Key KPIs to Track for Outbound Calling Success

Here are some of the essential KPIs you should monitor to gain a comprehensive understanding of your outbound calling performance:

Connect Rate: Measure the percentage of your outbound calls that reach live prospects. A high connect rate indicates efficient dialling strategies and minimal wasted time on busy signals or unanswered calls.

Average Handle Time (AHT): Track the average duration of your outbound calls. While a lower AHT might seem ideal, it’s important to consider the context of your campaign goals. For example, a complex sales call might naturally have a higher AHT compared to an appointment scheduling call.

Conversion Rate: This is the golden metric for many outbound calling campaigns. Measure the percentage of calls that achieve your desired outcome, such as a completed sale, appointment booked, or survey completion.

First Call Resolution (FCR): Track the percentage of customer issues resolved during the initial call. A high FCR indicates efficient problem-solving by your agents and minimises the need for frustrating callbacks for customers.

Customer Satisfaction Ratings: Customer feedback is invaluable. Regularly monitor customer satisfaction ratings to gauge their perception of your outbound calling experience. Positive ratings indicate a well-executed strategy, while negative feedback highlights areas for improvement.

Enhance your outbound calls with MaxContact

Successful outbound calling is a continuous process. By acting on the insights gained from tracking KPIs and consistently refining your approach based on data and best practices, you can transform your outbound calling operation so that your activity consistently delivers exceptional results.

MaxContact is a leading provider of outbound call software, combining powerful diallers with reporting, AI, and optimisation tools. Our cloud-based outbound solution can simplify your call centre operations and boost productivity.

Learn how MaxContact’s outbound call centre software can improve your contact centre operations.Book a demo today to find out more.

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If you work in a contact centre, you know quality assurance (QA) can often feel like a box-ticking exercise. Yet, QA is the backbone of exceptional customer service, agent development and operational efficiency. The challenge? Many QA processes are time-consuming, resource-intensive and limited in the insights they provide.

What if your QA process could do more? Imagine evaluating every customer interaction, uncovering what drives success, and delivering precise, actionable feedback – all without additional effort. This is where AI speech analytics steps in, offering transformative solutions that redefine how QA drives results.

At MaxContact, we’re taking this a step further with Spokn AI Success Intelligence. Designed for revenue-driven teams, this next-generation platform delivers actionable insights to optimise performance, ensure compliance and boost customer experiences.

The challenges with traditional QA in contact centres

Do your current QA methods give you the insights you need to truly drive agent performance?

QA is essential, especially when you consider that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases from companies offering excellent customer service (HubSpot). However, traditional QA methods often struggle to meet the demands of modern contact centres. Here’s why:

1. Resource constraints: Reviewing even a small sample of calls manually is time-intensive and costly. Due to limited resources, many contact centres evaluate only a fraction of their total interactions, leaving critical insights untapped.
2. Subjectivity and bias: Human evaluators often bring unconscious biases into assessments, leading to inconsistent results and insights that may not accurately reflect agent performance or customer sentiment.
3. Shallow insights: Traditional QA often focuses on generic metrics like call handling time or first call resolution. While useful, these metrics don’t capture the complexities of customer interactions or agent effectiveness.
4. Missed opportunities: Manual QA rarely identifies deeper trends, such as recurring objections, common customer frustrations, or effective objection-handling techniques. These insights could shape training, scripting and processes to drive better results.

For sales and collections teams under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, these limitations highlight the need for a smarter, more scalable approach.

How does AI speech analytics transform QA?

AI-powered speech analytics addresses the challenges of traditional quality assurance by automating call analysis and uncovering insights that traditional methods miss. Tools like Spokn AI transcribe 100% of calls from speech to searchable text files, providing a more comprehensive view of performance.

Key benefits of AI speech analytics

• Comprehensive call coverage: By evaluating every interaction, AI eliminates sampling errors and ensures that no valuable insight is missed.
• Objective assessments: AI removes human bias, delivering consistent evaluations based on data rather than opinion.
• Nuanced insights: Sentiment analysis, phrase identification, and trend tracking aid a deeper understanding of customer-agent interactions.
• Faster feedback loops: With automated insights, managers can provide near-real-time feedback to agents, reducing time between evaluation and improvement.

By automating the labour-intensive aspects of QA, contact centres can focus on driving results instead of sifting through data.

Set clear QA objectives with AI speech analytics

To make the most of AI, it’s essential to align your QA process with clear objectives. Here’s how to get started:

Step 1: Identify QA challenges

Focus on areas where your current QA process is falling short. For example:

• Are call agents struggling to follow scripts?
• Is customer satisfaction lagging?

Understanding these pain points will guide how to strengthen the output of QA processes with AI speech analytics.

Step 2: Define success metrics

Traditional metrics like average call handling time or first call resolution are helpful but don’t tell the whole story. AI speech analytics allows you to measure more nuanced factors, such as:

• Sentiment shifts during calls.
• Frequency and type of customer objections.
• Agent adherence to compliance scripts.

The real power of AI lies in turning data into action. Use insights to refine training programs, improve scripts, and optimise processes, ensuring continuous improvement across the board.

Practical applications of AI speech analytics

Now we’ve defined why using AI speech analytics to aid QA is better than traditional methods, let’s explore how tools like Spokn AI can be used to address specific QA challenges and improve outcomes.

1. Identifying training needs

AI can quickly identify where agents struggle – whether it’s handling objections, following scripts, or navigating sensitive customer issues. With a clearer view of these challenges, managers can:

• Develop targeted training programs that address specific skill gaps.
• Track progress over time to ensure improvements are sustained.

2. Enhancing compliance

Non-compliance can lead to fines and reputational damage. Speech analytics platforms, like Spokn AI, makes compliance checks faster and more reliable by helping QA teams to uncover calls where agents:

• Fail to disclose required information.
• Use unapproved language or phrases.

Without the use of AI speech analytics, this part of the process relies on quality assurance teams listening to calls, which is not only time consuming but focuses on a very small sample of calls.

The capability to search or track text transcripts for specific keywords related to compliance, speeds up the process and makes it much more scalable and robust, protecting your organisation from unnecessary risks.

3. Providing tailored feedback

Generic feedback rarely drives meaningful improvement. AI powered speech analytics software allows managers to deliver precise, data-driven feedback tailored to each agent. For instance:

• Highlight areas of strength, such as effective objection handling or empathy.
• Address weaknesses with actionable suggestions, like improving script adherence.

This targeted approach empowers agents to improve rapidly while creating a culture of continuous learning.

4. Recognising top performers

Spokn AI identifies challenges, yes. But it also highlights what’s working well. By analysing successful calls, contact centres can learn what top-performing agents do differently and replicate their techniques across teams.

Rewarding and recognising these agents boosts morale, also reduces turnover, and sets a standard of excellence for others to follow.

Ready to welcome AI speech analytics? Build your business case.

Can we take quality assurance even further with speech analytics?

Quality assurance is undeniably a crucial part of contact centre operations, with 83% of contact centres recognising it as a critical process, according to our benchmark report. But even with the help of speech analytics, QA is often limited to providing only surface-level insights.

For revenue-driven teams in particular – such as those in sales or collections – standard QA outputs often fall short. These teams need more than just metrics; they need precise, targeted and rapid feedback to drive results.This is where advanced solutions like Spokn AI Success Intelligence come in, elevating QA from a process of evaluation to a driver of performance and improvement.

Introducing Spokn AI Success Intelligence

Designed for revenue-driven teams, our upcoming Spokn AI Success Intelligence feature provides deeper insights into what drives performance, enabling more targeted coaching and process optimisation.

By delivering actionable insights into the “why” behind performance metrics, it empowers teams to go beyond compliance and drive real business growth.

So, what’s the difference?

To understand what Spokn AI Success Intelligence is, you need to know how it moves beyond traditional speech analytics to add a deeper level of insight into sales and collections processes:

Objection handling analysis

Categorises common objections, correlates them with outcomes, and provides actionable insights to refine scripts and coaching strategies.

Call DNA mapping

Identifies the key elements of successful calls—such as sentiment shifts and effective phrasing—allowing teams to replicate these across the organisation.

Enhanced coaching tools

Provides tailored insights that empower managers to deliver precise, impactful feedback, accelerating agent development.

Scalable automation

Analyses 100% of calls without additional effort, freeing QA teams to focus on implementing insights and driving improvements.

Transform QA into a driver of growth

MaxContact has over 20 years of experience in the sales and collections space, working closely with leading AI providers to develop best-in-class solutions.

• Deliver tailored coaching that drives measurable improvement.
• Optimise processes and scripts to maximise performance.
• Enhance customer experiences by addressing systemic issues proactively.

With Spokn AI Success Intelligence, we’re helping contact centres unlock the full potential of their teams and processes.Ready to see it in action? Request a demo today.

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The challenge: What makes a sales call successful?

B2C phone sales demands quick thinking, emotional intelligence, and deep product knowledge. The best salespeople can navigate objections, build rapport, and close deals – but top performers are rare, hard to find, and even harder to retain.

But what if AI could change that?

Imagine transforming any motivated individual into a sales powerhouse, regardless of their initial abilities. Instead of searching for the perfect sales candidate, AI-powered speech analytics can help any motivated individual develop their skills and become a high-performing sales agent.

Our latest speech analytics feature identifies the key behaviours, patterns and techniques that drive success, helping teams replicate what works at scale. For Contact Centre Leaders and Sales Team Managers, it changes the game. It’s about building excellence from within, turning potential into performance, and reshaping how we approach talent development in sales.

The evolution of Spokn AI: From transcription to AI-driven sales coaching.

Our speech analytics platform, Spokn AI, all started with a simple yet powerful mission: to provide businesses with deeper, actionable insights into their customer conversations.

2023: Launched as an advanced speech transcription tool.

April 2024: Expanded into a full speech analytics platform.

2025: With Success Intelligence, Spokn AI is revolutionising AI-driven sales coaching.

Introducing Success Intelligence: AI-powered sales performance analytics

Our Success Intelligence tool refines automated quality assurance processes that rely on traditional speech analytics. It moves QA beyond simple pass/fail metrics because it doesn’t just transcribe conversations – it understands them.

By identifying key success drivers, categorising objections, and analysing top-performing behaviours, Success Intelligence provides actionable insights that help teams close more deals, improve agent training and optimise call centre performance.

Why it matters for sales & contact centre leaders

• Replicate top-performing sales behaviours across teams.
• Improve objection handling to boost conversion rates.
• Align AI-driven insights with sales KPIs (e.g. meetings booked, deals closed, payments secured).
• Reduce training time and accelerate agent development.

Success Intelligence isn’t just about evaluating sales performance – it’s about unlocking potential and driving meaningful results.

Key features of Spokn AI Success Intelligence

1. AI-powered objection detection & analysis

Success Intelligence goes a step further than Spokn AI. The feature identifies common objections and how top performers overcome them. This allows sales teams to:

✔ Understand which type of objections are preventing conversions.
✔ Develop data-driven scripts to overcome those challenges and objections.
✔ Train agents based on real sales conversations, not just guesswork.

2. Performance benchmarking & AI coaching insights

Success Intelligence empowers you to uncover the ‘why’. AI analyses what top-performing agents do differently. Managers can:

✔ Identify behavioural trends that lead to success.
✔ Pinpoint specific skill gaps and provide targeted coaching.
✔ Optimise call strategies based on real performance data.

With Spokn AI and Success Intelligence, optimising your team for success has never been easier.

3. Conversation flow & engagement insights

Make sure agents are having real conversations rather than delivering robotic sales pitches. Success Intelligence evaluates:

✔ Silent time – When does a call go cold?
✔ Talk ratios – Who dominates the conversation?
✔ Monologues – Are agents talking too much or too little?
✔ Engagement patterns – What keeps a prospect listening?

Get insight into conversation quality and engagement levels, showing what works best for successful call outcomes.

The power of AI in sales coaching

AI won’t replace human-led sales coaching – but it will enhance it. With AI-powered insights, sales managers and call centre leaders can spend less time reviewing calls manually and more time developing their teams into high-performing sales agents. Here’s how Spokn AI and Success Intelligence is used to enhance the process.

What’s next? AI-generated coaching recommendations.

We’re working on delivering AI-generated coaching recommendations, helping managers provide instant, data-driven feedback to their teams.

The future of AI-driven sales success: What’s next for Spokn AI?

MaxContact is committed to continuous AI innovation. What sets Spokn AI apart is its commitment to customer-driven development. By actively seeking and incorporating feedback from users, the platform has rapidly transformed to meet the real-world needs of sales and collections teams. Unlike generic speech analytics tools, Success Intelligence is built for sales teams and shaped by real-world call centre needs.

What we’re working towards:

Advanced speaker separation: More precise agent-customer distinction.
Real-time AI alerts: Flag key sales phrases & compliance risks instantly.
Automated Quality Assurance checks: Reduce manual call reviews.

The human-centric approach: AI that enhances, not replaces.

AI should empower people, not replace them. And that’s exactly what Spokn AI does. It automates time-consuming data analysis, so managers and team leaders can focus on what matters: developing their teams, refining sales strategies, and driving business growth.

By delivering real-time, actionable insights, Spokn AI ensures that agents receive timely, personalised coaching, helping them develop faster and perform at their best. This data-driven approach not only enhances individual performance but also boosts engagement and retention by providing a clear path for career progression.

Why do call centres need AI for sales in 2025?

With increasing pressure to hit targets, contact centre leaders can’t afford to rely on guesswork. AI-driven sales analytics are the future of high-performance call centres.

Why MaxContact?
✔ 100% AI-powered call transcription & analysis.
✔ Designed for UK call centres – Built with UK speech patterns in mind.
✔ Integrates seamlessly with existing sales workflows.

Unlock sales success with AI today

• Want to see Success Intelligence in action?
• Looking to optimise your outbound sales performance?

Get in touch with our team today and see how AI-powered insights from Spokn AI and Success Intelligence can transform your sales strategy.

Businesses operating in the channel thrive by recommending the right solutions to their customers, based on business needs. Their reputations and revenue streams rely on having the right products on hand to help their clients reduce costs, improve outcomes or increase efficiency.

For communications experts or technology businesses, a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform is becoming an increasingly important part of any third-party product portfolio.

Generic communications solutions are not designed for customer communications at scale. Only a true CCaaS platform can offer the optimised features that create top tier outbound sales, after sales and debt collection campaigns, and at the same time unlock ROI for your business.

Partnering with MaxContact gives you access to our feature-rich and continually updated outbound CCaaS platform built specifically to meet contact centre requirements. We also offer highly competitive commissions and fees. In the rest of this article we’ll tell you everything you need to know.

The best solution for contact centres

By partnering with MaxContact, you can offer your customers what is, quite simply, one of the best and most competitively priced contact centre solutions on the market.

We won’t go into detail here, but these are just three features of MaxContact your clients will want to know about:

1. Intelligent auto dialling. Automate dialling in an intelligent and compliant way, with separate dialling modes for different types of outbound campaigns.
2. Omnichannel. Customers want flexibility. With MaxContact, your clients can get in touch with their customers using the right channel at the right time.
3. AI and speech analytics. Analyse customer sentiment, improve agent performance and satisfy the growing desire for instant answers with powerful AI technology.

The best solution for partners

But MaxContact isn’t just a great contact centre solution, we’re also a great fit as a channel partner, offering a potential path to significant profit for those we work with. We offer two flavours of partnership:

Referral partners

Industry specialists that work as consultants and advisors can earn a commission every time they recommend MaxContact to a client. Earn a minimum referral fee of 15% and up to 18% for every new client with ten users or more you introduce to MaxContact. All you have to do is make the introduction and we can take it from there.

Reseller partners

Reseller partners are typically technology companies that sell the MaxContact CCaaS as part of a portfolio of solutions or as an add-on to their own technology platform through an API. These are experienced technologists with unique insight into their customers’ challenges and opportunities. They take more ownership of the sales process, but our experts are always on hand to help with demos, sandboxing and solution sizing. Resellers earn a healthy margin of between 25% and 35%.

In both instances, partnership with MaxContact creates a new potential revenue stream and a new opportunity to impress clients. On top of that, when clients can get more of their technology or telecommunications stack from one provider, they’re more likely to stick with them.

Offering a CCaaS platform alongside other technology makes you more indispensable to your customer base. Or to put it another way, become the one-stop-shop that makes life easier for the companies you work with and drive loyalty and longevity.

Why partner when you can build?

If you’re a technology company, perhaps with a Unified Communications (UC) or VOIP platform, you may ask why you wouldn’t build a CCaaS platform of your own, or amend the platform you have to offer some of the features of a contact centre solution.

The simple answer is that doing so would be offering your valuable customers a half-baked solution to their contact centre challenges. Modern CCaaS platforms are at the technological cutting edge, offering AI-driven chat and speech analytics, sophisticated data analysis and a complete omnichannel experience.

Intelligent algorithms manage outbound dialling speeds to optimise both engagement and compliance. Security and data privacy are baked-in to every aspect of the service.

That’s to skim the surface of what a modern CCaaS platform needs to do. MaxContact has been developed by industry experts over many years. We invest continually in innovation, putting out updates on average every couple of weeks.

By offering something less than that, you risk disappointing your customers and putting them at competitive disadvantage. The alternatives are clear. Either plough large amounts of time and money into developing a full-featured CCaaS platform, or collaborate with a partner that has done the hard part already.

The second option is the quickest and easiest way to unlock revenue from a contact centre solution.

More than technology

Technology is key to unlocking ROI in the IT channel, but it isn’t everything. The kind of partnership you develop with the technology provider can make all the difference.

At MaxContact, we proactively help you sell our CCaaS platform to your clients. If your client has complex or bespoke needs, we’ll work with you to make sure they’re covered. If they require an integration we don’t already offer, we’ll always see what we can do.

And on a day to day basis, we’ll support your sales engagement, help you demo the product and work with you to make customer onboarding seamless. We’ll be there when you need us throughout the life of the contract, and our tech support team will feel like an extension of your own.

All of this is crucial to the partnership you have with us, and the partnership you have with your end users. When you work with MaxContact, you can offer customers the CCaaS platform they need alongside the support they want.

We understand that your success is ours. We’ll do everything we can to help you unlock ROI from our partner programme.

For more information on our partner programme or if you are interested in joining, you can visit our partner page for more information.

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As contact centre leaders navigate the ever-evolving landscape of customer service, it’s crucial to adapt to new challenges and embrace innovative strategies. At MaxContact’s ‘Afterwork’ community event, organisational psychologist Danny Wareham delivered a thought-provoking talk on unlocking contact centre excellence through engagement in a hybrid world.

Embracing the Hybrid Reality

Wareham emphasised that the hybrid work model is here to stay, and contact centres must adapt to this reality. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of employees have changed roles due to a lack of flexible working options. Ignoring this shift or attempting to revert to pre-pandemic norms could lead to disengaged employees and high turnover rates.

Trust and Social Capital in Remote Work

One of the key challenges in a hybrid environment is maintaining trust and social capital among team members. Physical distance can affect trust, as people are more likely to trust those in close proximity. However, Wareham argues that culture and engagement are not solely dependent on physical presence. By fostering a strong sense of purpose, clear communication, and inclusive practices, contact centres can build trust and social capital in a hybrid setting.

Watch the full talk from Danny Wareham:

The Importance of Vision and Clarity

In a hybrid world, where context and nuance can be lost in virtual interactions, it is paramount for contact centres to have a clear vision and purpose. Employees need to understand why the organisation exists, where it is heading, and how they contribute to its success. This vision should be woven into every aspect of the organisation, communicated frequently, and translated into actionable goals for each team member.

Reinventing the Future of Work

Wareham encourages contact centre leaders to reimagine the future of work rather than simply replicating old practices in a virtual environment. He cites examples of companies like Automattic and SF Recruitment, which have successfully adapted their processes to align with their core values and objectives. By rethinking talent acquisition, job descriptions, and succession planning, contact centres can tap into the full potential of their employees and create a more agile, collaborative workforce.

Creating a Shared Future

To create a shared future in a hybrid contact centre, Wareham suggests focusing on three key areas: recognition, technology, and education. Recognising behaviours that align with the organisation’s vision, rather than solely focusing on results, can encourage employees to adopt the right mindset. Leveraging technology as an enabler, rather than a mere substitute for in-person interactions, can unlock new possibilities for collaboration and engagement. Finally, prioritising education over training can help employees develop a broader understanding of their role and contribute to the organisation’s success in innovative ways.

Embracing the Opportunities of Hybrid Work

As contact centre leaders navigate the challenges of a hybrid world, it is essential to embrace the opportunities that come with it. By fostering a strong sense of purpose, adapting processes to align with core values, and empowering employees to contribute their full range of skills, contact centres can unlock excellence and create a thriving, engaged workforce.

To hear more insights on hybrid working and similar topics relating to the contact centre, join the MaxContact Community to be notified about similar future events.

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Call centres are an important part of many UK industries, but a recent report from ContactBabel revealed which sectors employ the most contact centre call agents and the growing use of cloud contact centre technologies across the board.

The study, UK Contact Centres: 2019-2023, sheds some light on the way different UK industries make use of call centre technology to place outbound sales calls and to handle inbound customer support.

Nearly one in five call centre agents in the UK works in the finance sector, which is responsible for 18% of the entire workforce.

However, finance firms don’t have the most call centres in terms of overall numbers – that accolade is held by the retail and distribution sector, which operates 13% of all UK contact centres.

Several other sectors are also significant in the UK call centre industry, including telemarketing for obvious reasons, but also the services and public sectors, IT and telecommunications, and utility providers.

“Almost 4% of the UK’s working population are employed in contact centres,” the report states. “Average contact centre size is 125 agent positions, with outsourcers, utilities, communications and finance contact centres having a larger than average mean size.”

The rise of cloud call centre technologies

The survey asked respondents what cloud call centre technologies they already use, or plan to use within the next two years.

Call routing and call recording scored highest, with 45% and 37% already using these as cloud services and a further 15% and 16% planning to do so within two years.

IVR and speech recognition ranked as the third most popular cloud call centre technology; 30% already use this as a cloud call centre service, and a further 17% expect to do so in the next 24 months.

Completing the top five call centre cloud technologies were CRM/agent desktop and workforce management – and both are closing the gap on the top three substantially.

At present, 26% of respondents use cloud-based CRM and 19% use cloud-based call centre workforce management.

But the figures for the next two years are significantly higher – adding 27% and 24% to those totals respectively.

That would see cloud call centre CRM rank joint second alongside call recording, and behind only call routing as the most common contact centre cloud technology, while cloud workforce management would be just four percentage points behind cloud IVR/speech recognition.

Advantages of cloud call centres

Read our blog 5 Benefits of Cloud Contact Centres to find out why cloud call centres are a scalable solution with excellent access from all over the world.

Some of the direct advantages of cloud call centre technology include:

• > Remote access from any available internet connection.
• > Advanced IVR features including ‘golden ticket’ call routing for VIPs.
• > Instantly scalable capacity to meet demand on any given day.
• > Inherent cloud resilience and dependable Microsoft Azure interconnect.
• > Flexible pricing and ability to reduce billing immediately when demand drops.

Together these benefits give cloud call centres flexibility and reliability, along with the ability to use talented call centre agents based all over the world – all while ensuring you only get billed for the capacity you use on any given day.

MaxContact is a customer engagement technology company with a difference. Find out more about us, here.

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