4 Call Routing Strategies to Consider for Your Business

There are several call routing techniques and approaches you can choose for your business, however, selecting the best one might prove difficult. Perhaps, you can’t seem to decide what strategy to use or want to combine two strategies? We’ve filtered four out of several, so you can easily make the best routing choice for your business.

1. Skills-Based Routing

Skills-based routing involves pairing the highest skilled agent to the customer. Ultimately, agents are assigned to callers according to their competency levels. By selecting routing agents based on skills, the business’s resources are fully utilized and customers’ waiting time is significantly reduced. When a client calls in, the automatic call distributor (ACD) routes the call to an agent with the specific skill set to handle and address the caller’s requests, complaints, or needs. For instance, if the customer speaks a foreign language, the call is automatically routed to the agent who can speak the same language as the caller.

2. Least Occupied Routing

Least occupied routing works by sending a call to the agent who has a minimal workload for the day. The calls get to the back-queue where agents who are occupied hit a ready state then hit the idle state (which renders them unavailable to take the call). In this call routing strategy, it is important to gauge how occupied an agent is so calls can be routed accordingly — this is known as “occupancy rate”, so an agent with a lower occupancy rate, say 40% can take the next call. Also, you can determine the number of staff you need at your call center by getting the total occupancy rate of all agents.

3. Next – available Agent Routing

This is somewhat similar to least occupied routing but as opposed to strictly directing calls to the agent who is less utilized, calls are directed to the next agent who is free regardless of their earlier occupancy rate. The automatic call distributor (ACD) sends incoming calls to agents who are waiting in line to receive a call. If no agent is available to pick the call, the call gets queued until an agent becomes free. With this model, agents are likely to receive different requests, so in cases where the agent does not have the necessary skills to attend to the customer, they transfer the call to more skilled personnel.

4. Predictive Routing

Predictive call routing is the latest call routing method to grace the call system industry. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to route calls to agents. The strategy helps determine specific, customer interaction outcomes by analyzing large amounts of data from both agent and customers’ end. Positive outcomes include a boost in sales, customer satisfaction, and retention. The smart call routing strategy also retains specific interactions to enhance the efficiency of the routing system in what is known as a feedback loop.

The Bottom Line

All of these call routing strategies are efficient and unique in their way. Determining the best for your company is dependent on your specific service operation and the nature of your business. But if you’d rather use a stress-free and efficient virtual phone system that seamlessly routes your business calls, then you should start with Talkroute. Using this service means, you don’t have to buy or maintain special equipment or spend hours deciding the best call strategy for your business. They do the hard work for you and deliver excellent results!