Intelligent Routing
The quality of a routing strategy drives the outcome of the top two issues that customers consistently complain about: queuing and the inability to deliver first time resolution. Although routing is built from a number of technologies, an effective strategy has to blend them into a simple but intelligent process that rapidly puts the right resource in front of the customer.
This only happens if the technical appraisal and design of routing is approached as a single workflow rather than a set of individual technology decisions. Even when this is appreciated, there are still a number of key issues that have to be resolved at each step in the routing process.
Call Steering
The initial objective of the routing process is to identify what the customer wants. Identifying the customer’s intention can be achieved through a number of mechanisms: simple call steering through number dialled, touch tone IVR, or “Say Anything” speech recognition. The key to success here is simplicity. Minimising menu selections or allowing the caller to talk as they would with an agent.
Identification & Verification
The priority then progresses to identifying and validating who the customer is. Although touchtone IVR provides simple customer ID&V, its numbers based interface provides limited capability. Speech based IVR delivers a more natural ID&V process since it is able to recreate the equivalent of a scripted agent interaction. It also has wider application since it can cater for alphanumeric data such as post codes and names.
More recent technology in the form of speaker verification offers biometric identification. This can be used as full or partial ID&V, depending on security requirements/data sensitivity.
None are intrinsically better than the rest and often function together once the technical routing strategy has been carefully analysed from the operational requirements. However whatever combination is selected, it is important to note that all require integration to business systems for access to customer data.
Segmentation
Criteria such as customer value, contact history or propensity to buy is needed in order to trigger the appropriate business rule that routes that type of service request/customer to the most appropriate live resource or self service application.
At this point in the design of routing strategies, it becomes evident to many that these technical decisions can only be made correctly with the guidance of a customer contact strategy which has previously identified operational priorities such segmentation criteria and service delivery models.
Unified Queuing
The final stage of the routing process delivers the customer to the best available resource. Since queuing is a real time event and the allocation of customers to resources is often over multiple sites and skill groups, this is a dynamic situation.
So it is vital to build this final all important decision on the intelligence that unified queuing technology provides. In contrast, integrated point solutions typically fail in their ability to factor into their traffic management, the complexity of media types, agent skills/availability and segmented customer groups.
It is also worth noting that unified queuing technology offers integrated reporting delivering ‘drill down’ business intelligence across all media channels, business units, teams and agents.
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Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Intelligent Routing.