South Africa’s Hannes van der Merwe, Mitel (News - Alert) product manager at Itec, recently said what most customer service professionals consider gospel truth -- customers really, really despise being abandoned to IVR and auto attendant “hell.”
"Many customers become frustrated when they get a long list of menu options to choose from when they call in to the contact center, and find themselves bounced around between an IVR and agents who can't help them," van der Merwe said. “The process of getting to the right agent should be as fast, simple and seamless as possible for the customer.”
Van der Merwe advocated ACD, or Automatic Call Distribution, as a way to offer salvation to customers yearning to find truth and meaning in their interactions with company support systems. The vast majority of customers ever have only two points of contact with a company, the product and the call center, and the vast majority of customers only ever use the call center when they have some issue with the product. Therefore, almost by definition, your call center is where your customer is either saved or eternally lost.
ACD is a kind of software that automatically answers incoming phone calls with an eye to giving them the best resolution, instead of simply dumping all calls in IVR.
Yes, sometimes IVR is the best, most efficient way to process a call, and if that’s the case that’s where the call will go. Customers don’t all expect or want to speak to a person for all transactions. But in the cases where the call needs to be handled by a person, ACD determines the next available agent capable of handling the caller's question and routes the call there. As you can imagine they’re most often found in organizations with large volumes of incoming calls, most with needs beyond what an IVR can provide.
Using ACD, calls can be prioritized according to criteria established by the company. Van der Merwe notes some basic criteria would most likely include such considerations as the caller's priority. In the end, your ACD should have ways of identifying how much business you associate with certain phone numbers, the agent they last spoke to, or simply which agent is best qualified to handle the call.
The ability to connect calls with specific agents can be worth its weight in gold. As van der Merwe says, “If clients are cut off midway into a call with an agent, they can be reconnected to the person to whom they spent 15 minutes explaining their question,” instead of being patched through to a new agent.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Tammy Wolf