It wasn't so long ago that customers used to call a company and speak directly to a human being. However, as contact centres started to deal with larger volumes of customers and calls, businesses needed a better way to ensure that those calls reached the right agents. Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) systems quickly became the status quo.
Now that we're living in a world transformed by artificial intelligence, we're finding even better ways to manage and route the calls that appear in a contact centre each day. Organisations of all sizes are exploring intelligent routing options to decrease their average handling times, improve first contact resolution and enhance agent utilisation.
The Evolving Era of Call Routing
Call routing in a contact centre determines which advisor handles each incoming call. There are many ways of doing this, some more intelligent than others. For instance, the most common strategy for an IVR is to use ACD-based routing, where an ACD system directs the call that has waited the longest to the adviser that has been available for the longest time. If an agent isn't available, the call is placed in a queue and picked up by the next available adviser.
Although ACD routing is simple and straightforward, it's not very effective at boosting customer engagement and ensuring first-time resolution. Rather than getting the customer to the agent best suited to handle their query, this system just routes a call to the first person available. As such, companies have created programmable solutions like priority-based and skills-based routing to enhance the ACD system.
For instance, a bank's contact centre might use priority-based routing to push customers with the biggest accounts to the front of the queue. On the other hand, when an ACD recognises a customer's call ID, it can route the conversation to the agent with the best skills to handle the issue that has already been recorded for that client.
Embracing Intelligent Call Routing
Intelligent call routing is all about ensuring that customers are matched to the best people to handle their call. Companies can either use programs and in-built measurement metrics to boost the intelligence of their routing, or they can explore artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence in call routing allows a bot with a rich data-centric background to analyse where a call needs to go based on advanced factors like the customer's history with the company, the sentiment that the customer expresses in the conversation and more. Artificial Intelligence offers a far more in-depth routing experience thanks to things like natural language processing, native language understanding, and predictive analysis.