Call center routing: avoiding pitfalls requires careful planning

Call routing is one of the biggest challenges faced by companies that have multiple call center vendors handling multiple products or services.

Routing is further complicated by multiple promotions running in multiple markets – and therefore multiple toll-free numbers connected to each product or service.

With all these factors in play, call routing quickly becomes exponentially complicated – and a single misstep when reallocating calls can have a domino effect.

Routing done right
Call routing isn’t something you can play by ear – you must start with accurate forecasting based on intraday and daily reporting. You need a big picture understanding of how calls are allocated and a tightly controlled system for making changes to your route plan.

If you reroute calls without sufficient analysis and planning, you’re setting yourself up for an ugly combination of overwhelmed call agents in one location, underutilized call agents in another, and frustrated customers – all of which adds up to lost sales, lost customers, and negative word-of-mouth.

Well-executed call routing, on the other hand, can maximize your call center resources and optimize opportunities for sales and satisfied customers. Think of effective routing as a kind of two-way matchmaking: you want every caller to connect with a call agent who is fully prepared to help them, and you want every call agent to be busy helping customers.

Call allocation for controlled testing
The typical strategy for call allocation is to keep calls distributed across call center locations rather than concentrating all calls of one type in a single call center. This not only creates a failover for site outages, it also builds competition for best performance results.

But there are times when businesses want to reallocate calls to create a controlled testing situation, whether it’s for a special promotion or a test airing for a new product.

Imagine that a company has calls for a specific product split between three call centers and then wants to do controlled testing for a new promotion. To accurately measure success, the company needs to create a specialized control group of call agents. Ideally, the agents in that control group will be centralized in one location to allow for tighter management of all the factors that might affect the success of the promotion (and accurate analysis of which factors could be adjusted to increase the promotion’s success).

If a special offer has good take rate under controlled testing, then it can expand to other test markets and other regions – and the calls for that specific promotion can be reallocated accordingly.

–Kathleen Alloune

Kathleen Alloune is Executive Director of Operations for CXO Global Solutions.

Related posts:
Managing direct response call queues: balancing volume with sales acquisition
Using a quality discipline to manage call center processes and execution