Call Routing and the Contact Center Conundrum

It seems as though the contact center industry is hurtling toward digitization and wholesale adoption of digital channels at the speed of light.  Here’s the thing, though – voice still matters.

Just to be clear, I think support of digital channels in the contact center will be an absolute necessity as generational expectations (GX) drive the customer experience (CX) in the future.  As I have previously written about in this blog, the contact center is now poised on the cusp of the most disruptive change the industry has experienced in its 40-plus year history.  The change I refer to is the impact of GX on the industry from both the customer as well as the worker perspective.

While digital communications become increasingly important to the customer service profession, it is also important to remember that digital channels are not going to make voice obsolete.  Voice customer service is ubiquitous in the industry today and it still remains the channel of choice for customers of all generations.  Figure 1 below illustrates penetration of customer service channels in the North American contact center market today.

Figure 1: Contact Center Channel Support – 2019

Source: Saddletree Research

The source of the data is Saddletree Research’s annual survey of end-users, conducted each year in conjunction with the not-for-profit National Association of Call Centers (NACC) at Middle Tennessee State University.  Results are statistically valid at a 95 percent confidence level with a margin of error of less than four percent.

As the data illustrates, the installed base of telephone customer service in the contact center industry is nearly 100 percent and, in fact, our 98 percent support survey result falls within our margin of error.  While digital channels are making progress toward greater market penetration, they have a long way to go before catching up to the phone.

Given the attention digital customer service is receiving in today’s market, we wanted to get a better handle on the impact the use of digital channels is having on traditional voice communications.  Figure 2 represents the responses from our research regarding any changes to contact center incoming phone volume in the past 12 months.

Figure 2: Changes in Customer Voice Call Volume

Source: Saddletree Research

Despite the growth of digital channel support, the reality is that 70 percent of the industry experienced call volumes the same or greater than they experienced in the previous 12 months.  Voice communications still dominate customer service, yet call routing strategies represent one of the industry’s most, if not the most, neglected CX processes.  Thus, our conundrum.  Effective call routing is critically important to today’s CX, yet it has been allowed to grow old and tired and woefully inefficient.

Figure 3, below represents the state of the art in terms of the distribution of call routing strategies in 2019.

Figure 3: Customer Call Routing Strategies – 2019

Source: Saddletree Research

As the data indicates, the contact center is stuck firmly in the 1990s when it comes to call routing strategies.  There is, however, a recent innovation that promises to push customer call routing swiftly into the 21^st century.

Predictive Behavioral Routing represents the first major innovation in customer call routing since skills-based routing was introduced in the early 1990s.  It is a welcome addition to a contact center technology segment that has been inexplicably overlooked for too long.

Grounded in analytics and constantly fine-tuned by machine-learning-based artificial intelligence (AI), Predictive Behavioral Routing communicates with the ACD to intelligently route calls to the best available agent based upon customer personality, behavioral data, and communications preferences.  Predictive Behavioral Routing relies on proprietary behavioral modeling along with the industry’s largest database of customer behavioral profiles in order to send calls to the agent whose skills and ability best match the profile of the customer initiating the call.

The net result of Predictive Behavioral Routing’s modernization of call routing strategies is a reduction in customer effort, increased first call resolution (FCR), and decreased average handle time (AHT).  An added bonus is the job satisfaction agents achieve when helping customers they are more likely to be successful with.

Predictive Behavioral Routing is delivered via the cloud as a software service and all the benefits of the cloud contact center such as cost savings, flexibility, ease of maintenance, and unprecedented reliability, are inherent in the product.  Predictive Behavioral Routing is ideally suited to meet the needs of the new generation of customers and workers, and gives the contact center industry a much-needed alternative to traditional call routing technologies.

To read more about Predictive Behavioral Routing visit our webpage.