How do you put customers who call you in touch with the right person as quickly as possible? How you prevent them from complaining about waiting on-hold, calling a competitor, or talking with the wrong department?
Call Routing is an effective way to improve your customer interactions while more efficiently handling incoming calls, cutting the high costs associated with a call center and ensuring that your customers’ calls are being handled by the right person in the shortest amount of time. But it’s important to realize that not all calls are routed in the same way.
Here are our recommendations for the top 10 call routing strategies:
- Direct Routing: This is the simplest routing option out there. Each department in your company has a different number and it is up to the customer to dial the number assigned to, for example, sales. While easily implemented, this strategy asks a lot of customers and can mean long wait times if the department is handling other calls.
- Routing by Schedule: Now we’re getting into more powerful approaches, all of which benefit from the fact that customers need to remember only a single phone number. You–not the customers–handle the routing. By routing calls based on schedule, you can ensure that calls will go to agents who are on the job. If certain call agents only work two days a week, calls will only be sent to them on those days. You can easily create custom routing to take into account office hours, lunch, after hours, weekends, holidays and more.
- Routing by Geography: Routing calls by geography allows you to maintain one easily remembered number even if you manage multiple store or franchise locations. Callers benefits by using one national number and their calls are routed based on area or zip code and sent to the nearest location.
- Routing by Percentage: If you use multiple call agents to receive customer calls, you’re going to want to fairly share the workload. Routing by percentage of calls sent to each call agent will help you do this. A dedicated manager’s dashboard will allow you to see how many calls each agent has received and who is in line to take the next one. This minimizes the wait-time for customers, as they’re sure to reach the next available agent.
- Routing by Caller ID: Not all customers are created equal. You can input the phone numbers of certain customers to route their calls to a specific destination. Let’s say the contract of a certain customer is expiring: the next time she rings, her call can be sent to an agent who specializes in retention of existing customers. The possibilities are endless when you’re dealing with individualized customer service.
- Routing by IVR: Ask customers a series of short qualifying questions using Interactive Voice Response and their answers can determine who should handle the call. This strategy is especially good for lead generation businesses and call centers.
- Store Locator Routing: Sometimes a customer just wants to reach the nearest retail location, instead of speaking with an agent from the company headquarters. You can route his call to the closest location without requiring separate numbers for each store by using any of the strategies listed above, though routing by geography seems to be most effective in this case.
- Skills-Based Routing: This is similar to Routing by IVR but has a different focus. In this case, your IVR questions are designed to determine what, precisely, the customer needs. With this knowledge in hand, you can send the call to a staffperson specially trained to handle such issues.
- Call Tracking Number Routing: Call Tracking is the practice of measuring and tracking the sources of incoming phone calls, most often by using unique phone numbers in unique advertisements. When a customer dials that unique number you can create a custom greeting, mentioning the ad that led to this call.
- Database Integration Routing: Phone calls are maybe your most crucial customer interaction but they’re not the only customer interactions. By integrating your Call Routing with your customer database, you can easily look up the caller by phone number, see what previous interactions you’ve had with the customer and act accordingly. For example, if the caller is a current customer, route him to customer support. If the caller is calling for the first time, route her to sales.
Give us a call to learn more about any of these strategies or about Call Routing in general.