5 Benefits of Call Routing for Your Contact Centre

Call routing is a vital tool to have in place at your call or contact centre to ensure your business can provide the best service. Why? It reduces customer wait time by enabling available or even specialist agents to answer incoming calls. Omnichannel call and contact centre features from Microtalk can boost the productivity of your business by over 25%. So, read on to learn about call routing and how it can aid your business.

What is call routing?

Call routing is a call management system that enables available agents to answer incoming customer calls, as the call routes to the free agents to reduce customer wait time. Not only does it automatically place and distribute incoming calls to available employees, but it can direct them to specific agents or departments.

Call routing happens before any of the agents at your business pick up the call and is triggered by the actions of the caller or pre-defined attributes, such as the language or location of the caller, if they have selected a certain company department or agent availability and call volume.

So, the most common call routing strategies are:

• Direct call routing — different numbers for different departments.
• Automated call routing — gathers information from the customer, often using Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and transfers them to the relevant department.
• Skills-based call routing — routes enquires based on the skills of your agents.
• Advanced call routing — advanced, or intelligent, call routing uses a combination of caller location, agents skills, call volume, and more.

Ultimately, call routing reduces waiting times and helps resolve customer issues far quicker than if all calls were directed to the reception or queued to the same or random agents.

How does call routing benefit customers?

Good customer service is crucial to all contact and call centres. These days, many customers expect to be able to contact a business at the time that suits them in the way they prefer. Imagine a customer with a query — or worse, a complaint — picking up the phone and dialing your company. With call routing in place, the phone system can provide several options (depending on the size and departments within your business): customer service, technical support, services (like account statements or payment support), and more. They simply need to select the right department to get forwarded to a free agent within that team.

Without call routing, they’d be faced with a lengthy wait to be answered by reception, along with all other incoming calls, and then another wait to be transferred around the contact centre. This is annoying for customers calling with a query and bad news for your business if the wait causes a complaint to tip over into a bad review!

How does call routing benefit your business?

As contact and call centres are relied upon during all hours of the day, having the right tools in place will help your business move with the times and be able to handle all customer interactions with ease. Not only does it improve the customer experience and reduce wait time, but ensures the skills of your agents are put to use and evens workload amongst your team. Customers also receive all the information they require from a single call, so they don’t need to call back and the cost per interaction decreases. Call routing leads to both happy customers and a happy workforce!

Microtalk offers advanced call routing, so your call or contact centre can automatically change the routing of incoming calls when the office is closed, to external numbers (including landline, mobiles, and international numbers), and even automatically change routes based on the day of the week. Find out more about our contact centre features at microtalk.co.uk/contact-center.