What are the Benefits of Call Routing?

When a customer calls into your customer service line, they expect their issue to be resolved. In fact, resolving issues in an efficient and knowledgeable manner is the difference between a successful customer service strategy or a poor one. Poor customer service leads to customers choosing competitors, and that results in declining profits.

That’s why modern contact centers, such as Advantage Communications, are implementing new technologies and strategies that significantly improve the customer experience (CX), ensuring that customer queries aren’t left unanswered. 

One such strategy used by modern contact centers is call routing. 

What is call routing?

Call routing is a basic function of any call center. In its simplest definition, call routing is a call management strategy used by contact centers that aims to connect customers with the correct customer service representative to answer their query. 

As part of the call routing process, each incoming call is placed in a queue and is then routed to a specific agent based on pre-established rules and criteria. This happens before your customer even speaks to one of your customer service representatives.

Call routing can be established by user prompts and the use of call center artificial intelligence  technology (AI), which we covered in our previous blog on interactive voice response (IVR), as well as through call attributes such as the time of day, language preferences of the caller, call volume or the department requested. 

What are the benefits of call routing?

Once a call route has been established, a customer will be sent directly to the customer service representative that is best suited to resolve their specific query. This has numerous benefits for your company.

Successful call routing will not only help customer service agents optimize their time, it will reduce wait times for customers. Customers will spend less time on hold, and they’ll have a far higher chance of their query being resolved.

Most importantly, however, routing calls to the agent best suited for the call will significantly improve your organization’s customer experience. By implementing a more efficient process in which customers are routed to the correct agent, your customer service team will be able to improve first-call resolution (FCR), customer satisfaction as well as a wide range of other customer service metrics. 

What types of call routing exist?

There are several types of call routing that customer service teams can use to connect a customer with the most effective sales representative for their specific request. Here are a few key types of call routing:

Skill-based routing: This call routing method matches a callers’ needs to the most qualified sales agent available at the time. This could involve routing a caller to a specialist, for example an agent with deep technical knowledge, or a representative with product expertise.

IVR call center routing: Interactive voice response is an automated call routing technology where customers are able to select from a menu of prompts, either by using their dialpad or through artificial intelligence speech recognition. Once this information is received, the caller will be rooted through to the best-placed agent to answer their question. 

Least occupied routing: This method automatically routes calls to agents who have taken the fewest calls up to that point in any given day. Whilst this routing method needs to be managed differently to those above, least occupied routing ensures that all customer service representatives have an equal amount of work, it does lead to wasted time as it doesn’t send callers to agents who are specialized to deal with their request. 

Are you looking for more information about call routing, or simply want to enquire how Advantage Communications can transform your organization’s customer service offering? Contact our team of experts today.