Call routing is one of the most vital necessities for businesses where the employees have to deal with a huge number of calls. Since most businesses have dedicated call-based customer support, one should prepare for handling situations when the customer helpdesk starts receiving multiple calls at once. If these calls are queued for a few executives only while the others are free, your employees will start getting exhausted. As a result, they will find it hard to attend the calls properly or will cause delays in responding to the calls.
Improve Customer Experience with Proper Call Routing Strategies
To remedy this trouble situation, call routing is one of the best solutions. It distributes the work pressure equivalently between the executives thereby improving the overall customer experience. However, with the growing demand for immediate assistance from customer service, it is imperative to streamline the routing strategies to enhance CX effectively without causing haywire amongst the executives. Moving on with this topic, here we will talk about some of the most effective strategies for call routing. They can prove quite effective for the call executives working in the customer service department.
Skill-based routing
You cannot expect all your customers to have the same problem or relatable ones. It is therefore hard to choose the executive who could solve the issue instantly without passing over the call from here and there. This is where skill-based call routing comes into play as it directs the calls to the most skillful agent currently working actively in the customer support system.
Organizations use several software systems for directing the calls, like the IVR, speech recognition, and more. Any such system requires feeding the skills of the executives to a central management system, and then setting certain questions and possible options. When a customer calls the help desk, the IVR will conduct these questions and ask the caller to select the most appropriate option. Finally, based on the options selected, the software will decide which executive can solve the problem based on the skills entered. Therefore, the call redirection will happen automatically without human intervention.
Direct routing
The most common call routing strategy is direct routing, usually implemented in cases where the company has just launched the customer service center. Since not many executives will be there and the call volume will be low, you can segregate the resources based on separate domains of the business. For example, if you deal with an ecommerce business and want to implement direct routing, you have to divide the entire team into sales, technical, finance, and more.
Usually, each group will have one to three executives at the most. When a customer faces any problem related to the sales team, the call direction will take place to the concerned executive straightaway. There will be no intermediate assistance or a question-answer round involved.
Least occupancy routing
To implement the least occupancy call routing strategy, you need to incorporate the automatic call distribution software with the centralized business op. Here, the executives need to declare their status, whether active or inactive at the end of each call. No calls will route to the executive having “inactive” status. However, when the same person changes the status to “ready/active,” the ACD software will redirect the next call waiting in queue to the concerned executive.
Usually, the strategy scans the list of available executives and checks which person has worked the least throughout the day. Once it finds the first person, the call will be redirected to his queue. Even though it is a helpful routing strategy, several problems may still follow. For example, you will not be able to implement it if the customer service always remains busy in the calls.
Intelligent call routing
An intelligent call routing strategy will help you manage the incoming calls before you can redirect them to the agents. When running an extensive business like an online delivery system, not all calls intend to seek the attention of the customer executives. For example, a caller can dial the help desk number to know the status of a dispatched order. Therefore, connecting the caller to an executive will be pointless when you can sort out this issue with the IVR system.
On the other hand, when a caller needs to sort out some payment-related issues, you have to redirect the call to a skilled person who can handle the problem easily. Such kinds of calls are hard to handle with the IVR system only, so intelligent routing will help you transfer the important calls only to the agents. The automated messages from the IVR system can handle the rest of the incoming calls.
Value-based routing
In the value-based call routing system, the organizations use special software to detect whether the customer is about to drop out of the call or not. Sometimes, when an agent fails to solve the issue or has kept the caller in the queue for a long time, the person will want to drop out of the call due to poor experience. If it happens for one of two customers, it is okay. However, when most callers start to express their concerns about not getting proper value in the customer service system, things might go out of control.
This is where the value-based routing strategy becomes effective. Once a customer starts to express displeasure, the call gets immediately redirected to the retention team. The callers in this team keep the customers engaged and make sure not to upset them in any manner.
Takeaway
Call routing is one of the most important aspects of a business. It does not matter whether you have a retail business or an IT company. Customer service involves the end customers and your clients, vendors, and internal employees working in different departments. This is why implementing the right routing strategy is very important so that the executives can attend to every call without getting overwhelmed by the end of the day. To seek the efficient call routing services for enhanced productivity of your business, contacting 10Digits would be a smart move.