Advances in technology have delivered new challenges to organizations trying to provide the best possible customer service. Customers have significantly more options when contacting your organization, through email or Web chat, and organizations are operating multi site call centers and/or multi channel contact centers. Traditional contact center routers may not be doing the job anymore. Smart companies will treat each interaction, regardless of contact channel, as an opportunity to strengthen existing relationships and beat the competition. There are several solutions to help you excel in this demanding and ever-changing contact center environment.
Routers are Not Created Equal
Contact center management demands that intelligent routing engines provide a robust and flexible environment. Today, it’s not enough to have your basic PBX router or computer telephony integration (CTI) middleware because they are limited in their capabilities. However, with the introduction of premier skills-based routing, contact centers are able to route contacts to the most appropriate agent while still meeting service level requirements.
Premier skills-based routing consists of a routing algorithm optimized to meet agent occupancy objectives when your customer interactions fall within your service level threshold. As your contact center volumes increase and exceed those thresholds, the routing algorithm automatically switches from skills-based routing to service-level compliance. There are a number of factors evaluated by the router before it chooses an agent including:
- Agents’ skills
- Work priority
- Workload
- Service level achievement
Who’s On The Hot Seat Now?
Routing interactions based on your agents’ occupancy levels eliminates the hot-seating problem usually caused by traditional routers. Hot seating refers to sending interactions without balancing the distribution to agents throughout the contact center. Typical routers review a static list of agents and route to the first available agent on the list.
Conversely, premier skills based routing first determines the best skill type to answer your customer’s request. Then it reviews the occupancy level of every agent with that skill and sends the interaction to the agent with the highest occupancy level deviation. In addition, by defining the business rules for customer segmentation, contacts are routed according to a combination of business priority, service objective, and required agent skills. Premier skills-based routing ensures first-time resolution with every contact and reduces agent burnout by reviewing occupancy levels.
Responding Isn’t Enough
When your contact center service levels are not being met, premier skills-based routing can automatically bring your contact center back into compliance. It identifies customer interactions that have been queued for a considerable amount of time and enters them into an escalation state where they are assigned a higher priority. This enables your agents to provide faster treatment to customers that may be ignored in extremely busy situations.
During the configuration of agents, a reserve interaction type is configured to bring the service level back in compliance. As a result, your agents are automatically moved out of the skills routing logic and put into service level compliance mode. This enables better use of contact center resources during an unexpected increase in call volumes.
Multi-Site Routing
Some premier skills based routers will enable you to route your customers between multiple contact centers. By reviewing contact center statistics or service levels, multi site routing leverages the core router to determine the best location to handle the interaction the fastest. Once the best center is identified, the core router sends the interaction where premier skills can be utilized, reducing customer hold times and making better use of your contact center resources.
As time and technology have evolved, so have the options for managing the contact center. Determining what solution works best for your contact center is the first step to improved customer service and agent productivity.