Contact centre software is the system on which a company's support staff answer customers' calls, chats, emails and WhatsApp messages. It is also called a contact centre platform, call centre software or, when it runs in the cloud, contact centre as a service (CCaaS). It runs on top of the company's phone system.
Its first job is routing, which means choosing which agent receives each contact. The software holds every waiting call and chat in a queue. It knows each agent's skills, such as the languages they know and the products they handle. It sends each contact to the best free agent. Its second job is to show the agent who is calling. As the call connects, it opens the customer's record from the customer relationship management (CRM) system on the agent's screen. Its third job is recording. Every call and chat is recorded and stored.
Take, for example, an airline's customer care on a foggy January morning, when many flights from north India are cancelled. In one hour, 9,000 people call. The first thing they reach is the phone menu, the IVR, which asks them to press a key for their language. A passenger from Coimbatore presses the key for Tamil and types her booking reference. The software sees that her flight is cancelled. It moves her ahead of callers with bookings for next week, and sends her call to the first free agent who knows Tamil. Her booking is already on the agent's screen when he says hello. While she waits, the software offers to send her a WhatsApp link to rebook herself. Many callers accept and leave the queue.
Customers no longer only call. One platform now handles calls, chats, emails and messages together, so the agent sees the whole history of one customer in one place. This is called omnichannel service.
The software does not carry the call itself. The company's phone system does. That is either a cloud phone system or an older office phone system (PBX) in the building. The call reaches the contact centre software as VoIP, voice carried as data over the internet.
Contact centre software is usually sold as a monthly subscription for each agent, called a seat. Most platforms now also sell a bot that answers the contact first. If the bot cannot help, it passes the contact to an agent through the same queue. India's own cloud telephony companies sell this software to Indian banks, lenders and online shops. Indian outsourcing companies also run contact centres for companies abroad on the large global platforms.