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.
