As companies strive to achieve better customer satisfaction across multiple channels several issues usually arise with reporting, QA, channel-switching, and omnichannel routing. Standard ACDs with skills based routing route voice calls based on skills, function and priority, but does not take into account routing for additional channels.
Omnichannel Routing for Increased Agent Productivity
To increase agent productivity in an omnichannel call center, agents should be able to handle more than one interaction at a time. When an agent is working on an email from a customer, most of their time is spent waiting for that customer to respond. Enter omnichannel routing. With omnichannel routing this agent would also be routed chats, SMS or even phone calls to address while still working the email interaction. Omnichannel routing with an agent capacity model will help route several multichannel interactions to one agent based on your specific preferences.
Omnichannel Routing for Improved Customer Satisfaction
Another example where omnichannel routing comes in handy, is when you receive two interactions from the same customer over different channels. For example, you have an agent that is talking with a customer and the customer sends in a chat or social message to your to further explain their issue. Those additional interaction would be sent to the same agent speaking with them on the phone. This provides the agent with the full picture and provides them all of the customer information.
This can also be beneficial if a customer is calling in and has prior cases on other channels. The agent picking up the phone would immediately see prior interactions or any unprocessed emails, SMS, etc. from that customer.
Utilizing Omnichannel ACD Routing Technology in Your Contact Center
Standard ACDs with skills, priority, etc. were not designed to handle cases like the ones explained above. It would require a significant amount of PSO effort (sometimes it’s impossible) to build custom workflows to support them if last generation skills based routing is in place. Those efforts would immediately become useless when customers realizes that the rest of the system will not support those changes, like reporting, quality management with monitoring or WFM.
At Bright Pattern we designed our entire platform keeping in mind the omnichannel nature of our conversations and its importance in the contact center. Therefore our solution has omnichannel routing, reporting and quality management.
Bright Pattern routes interactions, like calls or chats using skills based routing with an additional application layer that understands who is on another side of the line (it has built-in automatic identification and personalization). It establishes conversation type and makes sure that all related interactions will be delivered to the same representative.
It takes into account Agent Capacity model (defined by supervisor) to manage distribution of multiple forms of media from different consumers to the same Agent and performs priority override if necessary (for example, call over email).
With these built-in mechanisms there is no need for “intraday management”, used to fill a gap between spikes in a call volume by delivering low priority tasks, like emails to representatives. Bright Pattern does this automatically removing another layer of complexity when Call Center admin have to use multiple systems.
