7 Modern Routing Capabilities and You Need Them All

Every time a customer contacts your organization, 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 along the way.

Sounds simple right?

It all comes down to a sound customer routing strategy. As contact centers have evolved, the art and science of ‘interaction routing’ has an increasingly positive impact on customer experience, as well as your efficiency and operating cost.

Previously, routing happened from linear, queue-based systems, providing limited flexibility into how customers were handled.  This led to long wait times, underutilized personnel and unhappy customers. Later iterations of hardware-based routing technology led to exponentially complex designs that offered only marginal improvement along with a high cost of ownership – especially for multi-site deployments.

When evaluating your next contact center solution, explore an all-in-one customer engagement platform that offers intuitive and intelligent routing capabilities for interactions and work items, across all channels and touchpoints. A single routing engine with common business rules is a key ingredient for making sure you deliver on both your customers expectations and your own business objectives. No matter your business goals, intelligent routing capabilities help you connect your valuable customers with the right resources, without the maintenance complexity inherent to legacy solutions.

Let’s take a look at 7 routing capabilities that you should have to your disposal:

1. Group-based routing – Routes customer interactions to a group of employees who share a common skill set. Group-based routing is simple to set up and get’s you going quickly.

2. Skills-based routing – Finds 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. Skills-based routing makes sure your customers are connected with the best available agent to meet their need.

3. 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.

4. Service objective routing – Intelligently analyzes your service levels to make real-time decisions on the most efficient routing path, balancing service levels across predefined queues. In times when you are understaffed, service objective routing will try to find the best possible outcome.

5. Cost-based routing – Evaluates employee costs when deciding who is best to handle customer requests, especially when you are using multiple outsourcers, cost-based routing can help you reduce operational costs.

6. Last Agent routing – Assigns interactions to the agent who last handled the customer interaction, even across multiple channels. 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. It will surprise them.

7. Schedule-based routing – Evaluates the workforce management schedule when deciding where to route customer interactions. Schedule adherence is increased and puts the operations team in firm control. Schedule-based routing helps to reduce unplanned overtime and ensures your agents better stick to their break-schedules.  You can also build schedules with multi-media shifts where supervisors do not have to manage these transition manually anymore.

Intelligent routing capabilities help organizations find the right balance between great customer experiences and operational efficiency.  It also helps to reduce operating costs, leverage economies of scale and increase your ability to deliver on service level objectives.