Results highlight changes in enquiry routing as businesses large and small strive to boost the customer experience while reducing costs
Intelecom, a provider of cloud-based contact centre solutions has sponsored ‘The Interaction Routing’ chapter of The UK Contact Centre Decision-Maker’s Guide 2015 (13th edition), published last month by leading contact centre analysts ContactBabel. The results, based on surveys conducted with over 200 UK organisations, demonstrate some interesting trends that reflect subtle changes in the use of call routing and highlight several notable differences between the smallest (below 50 seats) and largest (over 200 seats) contact centre operations today.
Borge Astrup, managing director of Intelecom Contact Centre Division commented,”The subject of enquiry routing often appears to be overlooked by marketers and even vendors in an industry where technical innovation is king. Yet the fact remains that routing is the foundation and glue of every contact centre. Without it, the contact centre operation would quickly fall apart. In an age when customers demand a far higher level of interaction with the organisations they do business with, sophisticated interaction routing capabilities are critical. Simply put, they ensure the right agent with the right skills responds to the customer to meet organisational objectives, keep costs low and enhance the overall customer experience.”
Highlights of ContactBabel’s research on Interaction Routing are:
• Integrated Voice Response (IVR) Routing – in terms of the number of menu levels provided to customers, 53% of mixed sales/service respondents present three or more menu levels, whereas 88% of entirely sales focused respondents report providing only one or more levels
• Size matters: 31% of respondents keep it simple with a single level of menu, eg, Press 1 for Sales; 2 for Service; 3 for Accounts whilst 54% of their larger counterparts regularly present a possible three or more routing levels of menu to their customers
• The larger and more complex the organisation, the greater the number of menu levels and options provided, with 70% of 200+ seat contact centres offering seven or more total routing options to their customers
• Routing calls based on current and past agent activity is still the most widely used routing strategy, with little real difference across contact centre sizes (72% of small, 81% of medium and 83% of large contact centres)
• Skills-based routing is now the second most popular routing strategy, particularly in contact centres with more than 200 seats (90%) where meaningful pools of skill-sets can be more easily created and used
• The larger the organisation, the greater the number of different agent skill-sets considered when using skills-based routing. Only 9% of small contact centres have more than ten identified skill-sets, compared with 55% combined for medium and large contact centres, versus the average across all groups of 21%.
For more information and to see the full results of ContactBabel’s research around Interaction Routing and Intelecom’s response to it, please visit www.intele.com/industry-research/contactbabelguide/
About Intelecom
Intelecom is a leading provider of contact management solutions. With over 17 years’ experience, Intelecom was one of the first to develop a cloud-based contact centre. Highly flexible and scalable, Connect from Intelecom can be adapted to accommodate one to several thousand concurrent agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly.
Intelecom Connect is one of the few contact centre solutions that is completely multi-channel. Intelecom Connect agents can respond to Phone, Email, Chat, Social Media and SMS enquiries all within the one application.
For more information please visit www.intele.com
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