What is predictive call routing?

27% of customers state ineffective service as their number one customer service pet peeve with 72% of customers believing poor customer service to be ‘explaining their problems to multiple people’.

This is where intelligent automation comes in by way of predictive call routing. If your organisation wants to improve customer experience KPIs within your contact centre, investing in predictive routing automation could help.

What is predictive call routing?

How many callers experience an excellent CX with contact centres? Only 18%.  When customers call a contact centre for support, they expect three things:

1. To have their problems resolved quickly
2. To have a personable interaction with their contact centre agent
3. To get allocated to a skilled customer service representative.

The first and second point comes down, more or less, to the training of contact centre representatives. The third one, however, comes down to contact centre technology. Enter predictive call routing.

Predictive routing or call routing is technology within a contact centre that is able to identify which customer service agent is best suited to the individual customer calling. The software can evaluate past customer behaviours and identify its persona type, product preferences and other criteria to predict the necessary skills or even personality traits of a contact centre agent, that would be the best fit for each caller.

Every time a customer interacts with the business, or calls the contact centre, the artificial intelligence within the tech updates. This might mean that the contact agent assigned on a call a few weeks ago may not be the best person to resolve the same caller’s query next time. This can lead to significantly lower hold times and prevent the need to pass on customers to a different agent to better help their query each time, and thus help in improving the customer experience.

Genesys’ ‘ Predictive Routing’ technology is a great example of this in action as it “matches customers to agents to deliver the best customer experiences using next-generation artificial intelligence (AI).”

Here at Probe CX, we implemented Genesys’ predictive call routing technology in our contact centres and saw it reduce average handling times by 14% and call transfers by 5%. It reduced overall workloads for the contact centre, allowing for employment savings of up to 13 full-time agents.

What are the benefits of predictive call routing?

There is more to the benefits of predictive routing than just ‘the right person for the right query.’

Higher first contact resolutions

First contact resolution (FCR) measures how many incoming calls in a contact centre are resolved at the first point of contact. Why is it important to keep these levels high? Imagine you are going back and forth between contact centre agents to resolve your question. Each time you are transferred or told to wait on hold, you get more and more frustrated. In fact, 33% of customers are most frustrated by having to wait on hold. That means there is more chance that these callers will drop off the call and leave with a bad impression of that particular business.

“I waited on hold for 40 minutes and gave up” or “I’m never buying from this company again if I have to speak to three different people to get one quick answer.” Predictive call routing aims to get the caller allocated to the right representative on the very first call.

Reduces queue and agent overload

Not only are your customers frustrated by having to wait on hold, but your contact centre agents also feel the pressure. They are the ones having to calm those customers which can be quite mentally taxing and can lead to higher agent attrition rates. Predictive call routing can help agents by ensuring they receive calls that match their skill set, resulting in reduced call transfer rates, queue lengths and average handling times. This can lead to improved job satisfaction and less pressure.

Improve contact centre efficiencies

Depending on the software, predictive call routing can be programmed to learn from third-party and publicly made available customer data, including social media, to further improve the customer experience and understand each customer persona better. This directly translates into better quality conversations and provides agents with personalised information to get each caller’s query resolved in the most optimal manner.

How to get started with predictive call routing?

If you are looking to get this type of technology implemented into your contact centre, partner with a business that has first-hand experience in implementing and managing programs that require technology to improve your customer service KPIs while supporting your agent needs.