IP Contact Center Technology: Eliminating The Risks (Part VII)

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Aug 2005 by Borodow, Eli, Hayden, Kevin

There are a wide variety of routing strategies that contact centers rely on to maximize operational efficiency. The effectiveness of those routing strategies is enhanced when phone calls and multimedia Web communications can be unified into a single universal queue subject to common routing rules.

This month, we focus on the various means by which call center efficiency and customer satisfaction can be enhanced through more efficient routing of customer communications to agents best qualified to help. The best IP contact center solutions incorporate these strategies while adding new tools that advance the objective of optimized transaction processing. Understanding the differences between various routing approaches can empower you to mitigate the risks up front.

So what are these routing strategies? You'll find some of the most common routing strategies listed below, along with emerging new strategies that offer compelling benefits for both multisite and single-site contact centers.

Customer Priority Routing

Which customer should leave the queue first? Intuitively, most people assume that call centers treat all customers equally and therefore, that all calls are routed from the queue on a first-in/first-out basis. In fact, best practices dictate that highvalue customers should receive "better" treatment than the baseline level of service delivered to lower-priority customers. Today companies generally route priority callers from the queue ahead of others who might have been waiting longer. Here, the customer is typically identified either by the telephone number that he or she is calling from or by prompting the customer to enter an I.D. number.

Of course, such an approach begs the question of how long a lower-priority customer can be expected to wait for service as others continue to move ahead of him or her in queue. The answer lies in time-sensitive escalation, where lower-priority customers are gradually escalated in priority as they wait in queue, to ensure that they eventually achieve sufficient priority to be routed to an agent. Typical customer priority approaches offer five degrees of priority. Of course, different queues will have different escalation rules and intervals depending on business needs. (For example, an unknown caller requiring information about a company's top-of-the-line product might be assigned a higher default priority than a known customer calling for information on a low-cost item.)

Regional Prefix Pattern Routing

The next potential decision, once customer priority has been established, is whether to route callers based on the geographic origin of the call. For example, callers from a particular city or state might be routed to agents in that same city or state if local knowledge would facilitate the call. Another example would be to route local inquiries to region-specific account managers. Regional prefix pattern routing enables that to happen. It also enables different routing rules to apply depending on how many digits in the customer's ANI (equivalent to caller LD.) match particular predefined patterns.

Agent Association Routing

Another potential routing decision is whether to attempt to route a caller to the same agent that caller has spoken with in the past. This can be valuable both from a relationship-building perspective and as a means of avoiding repetition when callers call to follow up on open issues.

Business Event Routing

Given that companies may have different levels of resources available during different seasons, at different times of the day, on weekends, on specific days of the year such as holidays, in the case of emergencies and in a variety of other circumstances, companies may want to leverage different routing logic on those days to maximize efficiency with the resources available. Business event routing, which includes a scheduling function, accomplishes just that.

Overflow Routing

Overflow routing enables different routing logic to apply whenever a call, e-mail, voice mail, fax or live Web communication (collectively referred to as "interactions") has been in queue for more than a pre-specified period of time. Examples of overflow routing triggers include a change in routing logic whenever the number of queued interactions exceeds a prespecified limit or a pre-specified ratio of logged-in agents to queued callers. Examples of corresponding changes to routing logic include transfers to different "overflow" workgroups or to self-help IVRs (in the case of phone calls) or Web pages (in the case of Web transactions). Of course, callers who are transferred to overflow workgroups after excessive time in queue will typically receive a high default customer priority rating in the new queue to which they've been transferred.

Skills-Based Routing

Skills-based routing can dramatically improve service levels, agent productivity and overall contact center efficiency with no additional training or staff. Skills-based routing also helps to improve first-call resolution by dramatically increasing the odds of callers getting to the right agent the first time. Skills-based routing maximizes the probability that a caller will be connected to an agent who can handle his or her call efficiently - without transfers or long delays to find relevant information.