Not very long ago in the contact center, incoming queries from customers were nearly all telephone calls. Calls were placed in queue in the order they came in, and the next available agent would pick up that call. There may have been some routing parameters applied to the calls, such as language skills or department, thanks to the interactive voice response (IVR), but by and large, the process was very linear.

Today, the number of channels through which customers can contact are organization is staggering. Thanks to social media – and all the different platforms of that available – and mobile devices, contacts are coming into the average call center from all angles and around-the-clock. The conventional wisdom about call and contact handling no longer applies. Companies can no longer safely prioritize phone calls at the top and relegate all other channels to a lesser degree of urgency. Customers – particularly the growing mass of young “Millennial” customers – expect resolution via social and mobile channels just as fast as they would in a phone call.

For this reason, many smart organizations are changing how they route contacts, embracing something called “social routing” that – at its very core – allows the customer to take control of the transaction and self-direct contacts regardless of channel, according to a recent article by TMCnet Special Guest Dave Paulding of Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert).

“When interacting with the organization, either via the website or social media channels, the customer will be presented with a menu of agents detailing the agents’ name, skills and biography, and even photograph,” he wrote. “The list will be live and constantly updated with data such as average waiting time. In terms of skills, these can include anything relevant to the organization and the nature of what they supply, from language to technical know-how. In addition, it can include an agent rating based on reviews from previous customers.”

In essence, customers today are becoming more in control of their sales cycle and their buying process. They determine when and how they engage with a company, and even who they choose to engage with.  Social routing can do more than just meet customer expectations: it can close the gap that often exists between the sales relationship with the customer and the support relationship, according to a recent blog post by Flavio Martins for the Web site Win the Customer.

“Social routing eliminates the disconnect between the buying experience and the support experience by aligning customer needs with the organizational resources that can best match those requirements,” he wrote.

It’s not going to be a weekend task for most companies. Starting with a call center platform that allows integration to social and mobile channels, such as Five9’s (News - Alert) through its module Five9 Social, is a way to jump start a company’s ability to deliver advanced social media engagement capabilities for customer service and sales organizations. These solutions allow agents to respond to customers’ social media outreach in the same way they respond to any other contact, and these transactions can be queued, scheduled, monitored and reported just as more traditional channels and contacts can.

Doing it piecemeal by building a “Frankenstein contact center” in-house – something many businesses are doing today in a misguided attempt to save money – will ensure that all you’re really capable of doing is frustrating customers in a wide variety of channels.