The contact center acts as the primary department for customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention of any organization. To make sure that your customer service is up to par and you’re not losing business to dreadful on-call waiting, you have to utilize call routing services.
There are several touchpoints that are considered customer service performance metrics and which having a call routing service in place will help you improve. These touchpoints include:
- How long did the customer wait on the phone?
- Was their problem completely solved?
- Were they transferred to the right representative?
Read on to discover which call routing type is best for your business and how your operations can benefit from it!
What is Call Routing and How Does it Work?
A Call Routing System is basically an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) that directs calls to the relevant entity, lessening unnecessary barriers and hindrances in between.
The distribution of calls is based on pre-established criteria and rules, and it is a vital feature for your business or customer support team that receives incoming calls daily.
The call routing process is divided into three main phases of the call routing service.
The first phase is called Caller Input. In this phase, customers trigger your IVR system by using their dial pad or voice to respond to the pre-recorded questions asked by your call center service.
The next phase includes Call Queuing. In the queuing phase, your customer’s call is sent into the relevant queue via automatic call distributors. This is where they wait before connecting to the agent or department. These queues will be made according to your queries.
The last phase is Call Distribution. This is the final call routing phase, where calls are routed to agents and departments according to pre-established criteria and rules. This is how the system route calls to designated departments and agents.
Call Center Studio is packed with tools that will elevate your inbound operations. Give them a look today!
Call Routing Types
There are many ways of call routing. Whatever type you select entirely depends on your business needs. Let’s take a look at some of the call routing types:
Uniform
In this form of routing, the agent who’s been available for the longest time gets the call. Once they get the call, the next call is again transferred to the next agent with the longest availability.
Regular
You have to develop a specific order in this type of routing, and it is considered an efficient way of call distribution.
Round-Robin
This is an equal and relatively fair approach toward call distribution because calls are distributed equally among the entire call center team. So, this gives everyone an equal chance, and no one feels burdened with the risk of not attending the calls right away.
Simultaneous
This is considered an even better approach in more fast-paced business environments. Every user’s phone rings at the same time, helping the queue to be resolved quickly.
Weighted
There is a fixed ratio in this type of call routing system. At the end of the day, the ratio must add up to 100%, highlighting that all the calls were answered and queries were resolved.
How Call Routing Improves Customer Service Performance?
Whether you’re a small business or a large organization, you need to have call center routing strategies to increase your sales and enhance your brand image.
Here are 6 ways a call routing system can improve your call center customer service.
1. Direct Calls to the Right Department
Being transferred from department to department is frustrating; no one can deny that. The condition gets even worse when the waiting times in between are long.
A call center intelligent routing, aka Smart IVR, is one of the best phone systems used in call routing, directly connecting the customer to the relevant department or agent. Thus, not only does it help you attain happy customers, but it also helps you improve important call center metrics such as FCR (First Call Resolution) rates.
Read our success story to discover how we helped a major home appliance company save up to $600K each year with our AI-enabled self-service IVR!
2. Direct Customers to the Next Available Agent Quickly
We all know that no one likes to wait. The standard wait time for calls is 20 seconds, and anything over that can greatly affect your sales performance and brand reputation.
To avoid such unfortunate situations, you can easily implement call routing systems that are designed to automatically send incoming calls to the next available agent without making the customer wait unnecessarily and without putting the customer through several operators.
This process can also boost your customer service performance evaluation as it improves various call center data like AHT and average time in queue.
3. Improve Your Communication Quality
A well-established call routing system coupled with a well-integrated CRM system will help you ensure quality communication with your callers.
After the caller is transferred to the best-fit agent, they would be able to easily look up the previous conversations with that caller and personalize their journey, which will lead to better service levels.
Call Center Studio comes with 50+ built-in integrations with popular CRM software such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, SAP, MS Dynamics, and various other BI tools.
Wonder if yours is on the list? Ask our experts!
4. Get The Best Possible Chances of Conversion
Let’s suppose your customer quickly gets in touch with the relevant department, and their query is solved on their first call. Will this lead to higher chances of conversion? Well, of course!
The customers will be impressed with your speed and efficiency, and they will want to connect with your brand. After all, what’s better than solving an issue over a mobile phone?
Call routing can help you boost customer satisfaction and better chances of closing a sale.
5. Serve Local Customers
Having custom numbers can benefit you as it helps you create business relations in local communities. Customers will feel comfortable calling on a local number rather than an international one. This helps them relate to the business later on and have fewer doubts about it.
You don’t have to be in a particular region to have local agents work for you. With geo-routing, you can always set up a virtual phone number and an agent according to the market you are catering to. The agent will be available according to that region’s timezone and business hours. This will help you gain the trust of your callers and convert their calls into sales.
A little tip, try getting a toll-free number—customers feel more intrigued to call when it’s free.
6. Track and Improve Your Performance More Efficiently
All your calls can be monitored full time by an executive or manager can help them identify performance indicators of customer service. These indicators, along with metrics, will help managers make informed decisions.
They can view how agents work on each call and re-route any call based on priority. This will also help managers evaluate performance measures for customer service and how they can further improve their services to make sure to never miss a business call, enhance customer service, and boost overall sales.
Call Center Studio’s Monitoring and Reporting tools can help you be on top of everything from agent performance to service levels!
To Wrap It Up
Your business can start excelling and boosting customer experience with a single well-established call routing system, just like our 600+ clients around the world!
Book a demo today to get a walkthrough of other essential call center features that will give your call center a competitive edge.
