Increase Call Center Productivity With Automatic Call Distribution
It is an open secret that customer service plays a key role in the majority of 21st-century businesses. Call Centers are not the exception.
When communicating with clients, the agents should be highly professional and responsive. And the task of the reliable call system is to provide the company staff with all the required tools to assist in reaching this goal.
Right in here the ACD – Automatic Call Distribution comes into play.
The Automatic Call Distribution system, also known as the Call Routing system, automatically chooses the agent the incoming call should be directed to.
It’s really smart: no matter how many different teams and agents are in your Call Center, ACD will route the call to the needed department so it could be answered by the true professional.
Moreover, it takes care of business hours so that the caller would never feel abandoned and always receive highly-qualified support.
The Way ACD Works
So, the aim of ACD is to connect the right caller with the right agent, as fast as possible.
It can be adapted to various use cases.
Just imagine: there is the incumbent in your company, requiring some additional training in communication with the clients. And for this purpose you want him to answer as many calls as possible.
The call routing algorithm for ACD can work in a way this agent would receive the new phone call once the previous one is finished. The more practice – the quicker is career growth and the higher becomes the experience, isn’t it?
Let us consider another scenario: probably there is an extremely high call volume at the particular time of day and the department has trouble answering the calls, which may affect the Call Center Reports & Analytics as well as the level of customer satisfaction. Not really good prospect, let’s agree.
Therefore, ACD routes the caller to another department to resolve his problem at hand.
The most popular call distribution methods
There exist many possible ways of call distribution. Let us present you the most popular ones so you could choose the best variant for your business:
Simultaneous Call Distribution
Once this distribution is enabled, calls ring for every available agent at the same time. The one who picked up first – handles the call. This call distribution type would work best for you in case you want to respond to your customers as quickly as possible or if the first response time metric is most important to you.
Round Robin Call Distribution
This is the scenario when every new call goes to the next agent on your list in a continuous loop.
For example, if Tom took the last call, the next one goes to Ann, then to Mike, and so on. Once the call was distributed to the last agent in the ring group, the next one will ring to the first agent again, Tom in our example. This method can be used to distribute calls evenly.
Time-based Routing
The most professional Call Center Softwares allow their staff to set statuses and working hours so that the calls wouldn’t be routed to the agents who are on the break or working on other tasks at the moment of ringing. Time-based routing prevents involving busy agents to the call answering and decreases waiting time for your clients.
Phone Number Forwarding
If sometimes your working day passes outside the office, forwarding to your phone number can be a nice solution.
It’s possible to set up the ACD so that once you receive the new inbound call, but for some reason, you aren’t at PC at the moment, this call will automatically be directed to your mobile phone so you could handle it from anywhere.
Auto Call Answer
Auto Call Answer is an extremely convenient feature for the Call Centers, where it’s important to answer the incoming calls quickly as it avoids clients from long waiting time prior to the conversation with the agent. Thanks to this option, the agent may automatically answer the call once it enters the system. This is a very useful way of call answering in case it is not possible to be distracted to accept the call.
Learn more about Nectar Desk Auto Call Answer Feature.
What else can optimize your business?
One of the main ACD phone system tasks is helping you respond to customer calls faster.
There are many more benefits of Call Center Software usage that can help your business to grow, especially if you have more incoming calls than your agents can handle at this stage. Among them are IVR, Call Queue, Call Queue Callback, Voicemail option, etc.
Request the free trial or schedule the demo with our team, and we will be glad to show you how Nectar Desk can help you reach your customers effectively and easily 🙂