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From AI to Automatic Call Distribution, Your Contact Center Needs Intelligent Routing

Efficient Customer Experience (CX) centers on with First Contact Resolution (FCR). This metric measures the number of customer problems resolved on the first attempt; high First Contact Resolution means a successful contact center.

To achieve this, you need to ensure that customers are put through to the right agents, who are equipped with the right information to solve their inquiries first time. That requires intelligent routing and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD). But what are these, and how can you make most efficient use of them?

  • Automatic Call Distribution makes use of rules-based routing to dictate which calls should be routed to which agent, aimed at connecting customers to an appropriate available agent as quickly as possible.

  • But the modern contact center is no longer dependent on phone calls. Intelligent routing applies the principles of ACD across every channel of contact, allowing customers to reach their ideal outcome, no matter the channel.

  • The future of Automatic Call Distribution is powered by AI. Through voice recognition and sentiment analysis technologies, AI allows the modern contact center to push First Contact Resolution to new heights.

Effective customer routing is based on data. Want to learn more about strategies for unifying and utilizing your customer data? Download Content Guru’s whitepaper: Data First: Your Essential Guide to the Customer Data Platform to learn more.

What is Automated Call Distribution?

Automated Call Distribution ensures that customer contacts reach the right agents for the quickest possible resolution. To make these routing decisions, an ACD will consider a host of different factors:

  • Agents skills

  • Queue length

  • Real-time contact center performance

  • Agent personality

  • And many more.

Often, the aim of an ACD is to put the customer through to an agent as quickly as possible, to reduce customer frustrations. ACDs are capable of handling multiple queues, however, depending on the kind of customer inquiry they face. Speed doesn’t have to be the final word.

Automatic Call Distribution improves contact center efficiency in a number of ways:

  • By linking customers to the most appropriate agent first time, an ACD reduces the likelihood that the customer will need to be rerouted to a different agent, reducing overall Customer Effort Score and Average Handling Time.

  • An ACD can offer detailed insight in the form of queue and routing analytics; providing invaluable information on the common problems your customers face, and letting you adapt accordingly.

  • Automatic Call Distribution is scalable; this means that customers can be routed to the best available outcomes at any level of demand.

Automatic Call Distribution is a must-have for contact centers, but, in the era of omni-channel contact, ACD must adapt.


Future-Proof Intelligent Routing


The modern contact center is omni-channel. Though voice calls remain an essential and popular channel of communication, digital channels are becoming more and more common among customers.

Digital contacts still need to be routed to the best available outcomes, with the same efficiency and speed as their voice counterparts. Your Automatic Call Distribution must become Automatic Contact Distribution,

  • Contacts can be assigned to agents based on their channel; agents can be allocated different channels based on their skill set, letting your contact center specialize.

  • When voice queues grow too long to handle, your ACD can route customers to other channels, including self-service options. This lets you respond to customers quickly and efficiently, distributing contacts more evenly across your customer service estate.

  • Omni-channel ACD can orchestrate cross-channel journeys. If a customer calls up, they can be brought into a visual IVR, where essential customer context is collected digitally, and then used to inform routing. By blending channels, the ACD creates a more seamless overall experience.

Automatic Call Distribution is an essential element of the omni-channel contact center, and it will only become more significant as new technologies make it more powerful. Omni-channel is only the beginning; AI will power next-generation ACD.


AI-Powered Automatic Call Distribution


Artificial Intelligence enhances Automatic Call Distribution; allowing for more accurate routing decisions, a more seamless customer experience, and reduced overall customer effort.

With the growing interest around generative AI, customers will increasingly expect to see AI used to make their interactions with businesses more efficient. In the future, AI will become a customer contact necessity.

  • Through Natural Language Processing, AI can listen in on interactions (both voice and digital) and understand their content as a human might. This means that when a customer calls up, they can state their intention and be automatically routed to the best available outcome (no more, press one for…).

  • Conversational chatbots employ this technology, alongside adaptive personas, to guide a customer to a solution without the need for agent involvement. Customers with simple inquiries can be routed to self-service solutions like this to take the pressure off your agents.

  • Once given routing data to study, generative AI can provide crucial insights into your customer contact, pulling out trends that human supervisors might miss, to help you streamline the customer experience.

All this, and more, is in store for Automatic Call Distribution. To ensure that your ACD solution is always at the cutting edge, you need a future-facing cloud communications partner.

Personalized Customer Experience with storm®

Automatic Call Distribution is a central pillar of the contact center. Customer contact routing is something you can’t afford to compromise on; you need reliability, flexibility, and scalability.

With over two decades of experience in creating outstanding customer experiences, Content Guru is ready to help. Content Guru’s cloud contact solution, storm®, comes equipped with world-leading customer routing technology, complete with omni-channel functionality and AI-backed voice recognition.

storm makes intelligent contact routing easy.