
Zendesk
Avaya OneCloud UCaaS (formerly (formerly Avaya Aura Contact Center)) is a cloud-based and on-premise call center solution that caters to all businesses across various industries. The solution allows users to offer personalized int...Read more
Virtual Contact Center by 8x8 is a cloud-based call center solution for small to midsized businesses. In addition to call center functionality, this solution also supports other interaction mediums such as voicemail, email, web ca...Read more
AireContact is a web-based inbound, outbound, and blended call center solution for small and mid-sized businesses. It's a fit for companies in almost any industry....Read more
ChaseData CCaaS offers cloud-based, standalone call center functionality with customer service and support built into the solution. It’s designed for outbound, inbound and blended call center teams. Dialing capabilities inclu...Read more
Nextiva offers a robust call center solution for business large and small. Nextiva Call Center allows companies to deploy a contact center in the cloud for inbound and outbound calling campaigns. Smaller organizations can now acce...Read more
VanillaSoft is a sales and marketing automation tool that also includes features for telemarketing. This makes it an ideal fit for those who specialize in inside sales. It can be accessed from anywhere because it's web-based. ...Read more
The PIMS Dialer is flexible, scalable, and secure. It’s a cloud-based application, and the servers are housed in a state-of-the-art facility that’s operated around the clock, delivering extremely reliable uptime. Companies can cus...Read more
Mitel MiContact Center is a hybrid contact center solution that caters to businesses across various industries such as hospitality, healthcare, government, education and service providers. The solution can be accessed via web brow...Read more
Connect First is a cloud-based contact center solution, which provides users various applications such as multi-channel contact management, automated call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony in...Read more
Huawei eSpace is a unified communications (UC) solution that can support up to 50,000 users at multiple sites, and offers UC features and secure virtual private network (VPN) connections on mobile devices....Read more
Genesys Cloud CX creates fluid conversations across digital and voice channels in an easy, all-in-one interface. Designed to provide exceptional experiences for your customers and employees, it deploys quickly, is intuitive to use...Read more
NewVoiceMedia’s tight integration with Salesforce is reflected in its AppExchange 5-star rating and the large number of positive reviews. The solution is designed to work in tandem with Salesforce capabilities and data to deliver ...Read more
Clarity Connect is a call center management solution suitable for concurrent users and for organizations across a variety of industries. Clarity Connect is a contact center solution that runs on the Skype for business It help...Read more
Cloud communications provider RingCentral has expanded into the Call Center space with their Contact Center solution. The integrated suite powered by inContact offers Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, CTI, A...Read more
PhoneBurner is an outbound call center solution that allows users to log in from their computer and make calls from the connected phone, using imported or admin-provided lead lists. The system offers functionalities that include p...Read more
For many companies, call centers are where the rubber meets the road. They're where corporate strategies get tested between agent and customer on a chessboard of human emotion. They're where sales are won and lost and where customers get to hear the real voice of a company, including all of the good, the bad and the ugly.
The bottom line is that call centers—specifically the agents within them—present the company's face to the public and do so at many of the most important points along the customer journey. Despite extensive training, monitoring and coaching, agents can still slip up when faced with a good question, a bad situation or an ugly customer.
Call center scripting software is an inexpensive, scalable solution to many of these problems. This Buyer's Guide will help you better understand and evaluate call center scripting software. In it we cover:
What Is Call Center Scripting Software?
Common Features of Call Center Scripting Software
Benefits and Potential Issues
Call center scripting software is software that provides written prompts to call center agents, telling them what to say and when to say it. It can provide basic prompts based on general questions and answers, specific statements to repeat verbatim or some combination of the two. Most call center scripting software allows for a high degree of customization.
Scripted agent prompts and interface in the NICE inContact call center solution
The most basic call center scripting applications simply refresh the same script at the beginning of each call. More advanced offerings can select in real time from a library of prewritten lines, dynamically changing the agent's script based on voice recognition of the call's content. The most advanced offerings can even factor in the caller's emotional state, using artificial intelligence (AI) to listen for impatience, frustration and anger, then dynamically change the script as the situation requires.
Call center scripting software can be installed on-premise—on a local server that connects to each agent's workstation—or deployed from the cloud as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It's available as a stand-alone tool or can come as part of a call center platform or even a small business phone solution.
Call center scripting software offers a variety of tools and applications designed to improve both call outcomes and call center management. Various solutions may offer some or all of the following features and applications. As always, buyers are encouraged to carefully research their options before making a purchase decision.
Drag-and-drop script builder | Provides a graphical interface to help design complex, multivariate and branching scripts. Script designers can add to scripts by simply dragging and dropping new question or answer options and can follow the logical flow of a call at a glance. |
CTI integrations | Computer-telephone integration (CTI) is basic call center functionality that lets agents manage (place, receive, transfer) calls directly from their workstations and helps ensure on-screen scripting prompts stay in sync with each call. |
Software integrations | Call center scripting software can integrate with other back-end platforms—your CRM for example—to suggest particular scripts for particular customers, helping tailor customer experiences to individual customers. |
Pause, resume and transfer | These functions help maintain continuity when a call is paused, resumed or transferred between agents. When a customer calls back (or is transferred) the script resumes where it left off, rather than infuriate the customer by always starting from the top. |
Script library | Provides a selection of commonly used scripted interactions. Rather than repeatedly entering, for example, a call-conclusion dialogue, script designers can just choose from a list of previously written script dialogues. |
Analytics | Connects the dots between individual scripts and call outcomes. They can show, for example, which scripts lead to the fastest resolutions or the highest customer satisfaction scores. |
Implementing call center scripting software can bring many benefits, including:
Most agree that these benefits greatly outweigh the potential issues of using call center scripting software. Nevertheless, there's one potential issue that should be noted. Namely, agents should never sound like they're reading directly from a script.
Source: "Survey: What Customers Really Think About Your Call Center Script"
It's important to note that consumers prefer it if agents don't sound like they're reading from a script. In other words, there's nothing wrong with having agents use scripts. The problems arise when agents sound monotonous and robotic—when they sound like they're reading from a script and nothing more.
Keep in mind that this problem is easily overcome with proper training. Agents should be trained until they're familiar enough with the content of scripts that, when on actual calls, they don't need to read each one word-for-word. While call center scripting solutions can be a huge benefit to operations and to the customer experience, they need to be implemented intelligently and not seen as a "set it and forget it" solution.