Is Skype a good choice as a call center solution for a growing team?

Written by Apoorv Bhatnagar 

For any business that’s in the initial phase of its growth and looks up for handling their incoming and outgoing calls in an economical way, Skype might be an option that certainly comes across as a no-brainer. But only when you look at the aspects of growth and scalability will you realize the bottlenecks down the line.

Looking a bit deeper into whether or not the call center software that you choose has the adequate features that’ll help the entire team get work done efficiently, gives you a clear picture as to why a growing business might need to look beyond Skype. Skype is a good fit for an individual user, agreed. But for managing an entire business’ support team, it’s a misfit. It comes by as a software that can’t accommodate the needs of an entire team and help them handle a huge volume of calls, reducing the instance of missed calls and much more.

Not just that, Skype’s constraints to route calls with the help of an IVR, record incoming and outgoing calls to refer to later, escalate calls smartly with the smart escalation rules, or listen in and take over calls when needed using a live dashboard, curbs the real potential of what a fully equipped call center software can help your business with. And that’s exactly why looking for a better Skype alternative is needed if you want your business to grow seamlessly.

When trying to look for some alternatives that might be a better fit for growing businesses, Freshcaller, a cloud pbx software with a feature heavy build and perfectly placed pricing seems a good bet.

What are the key differentiators that make Freshcaller a fitting solution for SMB’s?

These features can help you get more insights on what Freshcaller could offer you better than Skype:

Multi-level IVR or phone trees:

IVR is one of the most basic features of a business phone system that helps a business attend as many calls as possible in a systematic and well-organized manner. Right from being able to route calls based on the relevance of the problem to reducing the number of transfers between departments, IVR steals the spotlight in a call center software, saving a lot of time and resource.

And Skype, not having an option to set up an IVR is truly a huge set back for businesses who rely on a call center software to become more efficient.

Call recording:

Being able to record calls is one of the most fundamental functionalities of a call center software. Call recording helps bring about transparency and an opportunity to learn from your colleague’s conversations with customers. Also in case of some thoughts of difference and confusion, referring to the recordings will help get some clarity on such issues.

Call barging:

While attending to calls, sometimes an agent might not be able to handle the customer well. Either the customer might be a difficult person in general or the issue might be out of his area of expertise. In such cases, if as a supervisor you can monitor calls and listen in to them, you can barge in and save the situation before it gets out of control.

Smart escalations:

Not all calls can be handled perfectly well despite of an IVR being set up. That’s when the option of smart escalations can help route calls to other call queues, other teams based on availability or direct them to a relevant voicemail. Smart escalations can handle these above-mentioned scenarios and much more too.

These are almost all the features that contribute a lot towards managing a team of call center agents as opposed to focusing only on functionalities that would make sense just to an individual.

In case, you want to get more detailed insights on Freshcaller and why it could be a better Skype alternative, look up their comparison page that has a curated list of differences. Also Freshcaller allows you to trial the product for free before having to decide if or not you want to opt for it.