There is not just one correct routing strategy, and even within a specific company there may be several different routing strategies that can be harmonised to provide the best experience for customers. Call routing can make or break your business. Stefan Captijn, Senior Director Product Marketing, Genesys, explains:
Every time a customer contacts you, you must determine the best possible treatment, one that matches the intent and value of the customer and aligns with your service level objectives and resource availability – from the front to the back office and across all the touch points and channels customers use.
So make sure you have the following 7 routing strategies at your disposal:
- Group-based routing – Route customer interactions to a group of employees who share a common skill set.
- Skills-based routing – Find the best skilled and available agent for your customer, with a skill proficiency reflecting the agent’s level of knowledge mapped to the customer need.
- Multi-site routing – Treat all your agents as a single pool of available resources based on skills, and deliver the interaction to the best available resource across any location.
- Service objective routing – Intelligently analyse your service levels to make real-time decisions on the most efficient routing path, balancing service levels across predefined queues. If you are understaffed, service objective routing will try to find the best possible outcome.
- Cost-based routing – Evaluate employee costs when deciding who is best to handle customer requests. If you are using multiple outsourcers, cost-based routing can help you reduce operational costs.
- Last Agent routing – Assign interactions to the agent who last handled the customer interaction. When you are looking to provide high-quality customer service, last agent routing is a great way to delight your customers and improve operational efficiency.
- Schedule-based routing – Make sure your routing takes into account the workforce management schedule including weekly and holiday schedules and schedule overrides. This puts the operations team in control, helps reduce unplanned overtime and ensures agents stick to their break schedules.
Intelligent routing allows organisations to find the right balance between great customer experiences and operational efficiency. It also helps reduce operating costs, leverage economies of scale and improve delivery of service level objectives.
Stefan Captijn
Stefan Captijn serves as Strategic Business Director WFO for the EMEA region of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Stefan has over 15 years of experience in the customer service industry and held various positions ranging from Information Technology, Sales, Product Marketing and Business Consulting Lead. In his current role, Stefan oversees the go to market strategy and it’s execution for the Genesys WFO product suite.