Cloud contact center services are a natural progression of distributed computing where both voice and data services are made available through hosted platforms. Cloud-based solutions offer flexibility and benefits where services can be scaled on-demand and does away with the need to implement and maintain, hardware or platforms.
Inbound call routing services benefit most from distributed setup. From a customer service perspective, this provides opportunity for 7×24 operation with employees from different regions and time-zones working normal eight hour shifts to provide a round the clock operation. It is also a convenient way to handle overflows as different time-zone working hours overlap.
Skills and queues are the fundamental to Automatic Call Distribution. Within a contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distributor), every queue should have an assigned priority with associated skills required for handling its calls. The employees of the contact center operation have skills with skill-levels identifying the their proficiency in the skill. The ACD routes the inbound calls to the appropriate queue based on the dialed number or the IVR selection. If multiple employees are available to handle the call, it will be routed to the highest skilled employee immediately without making the caller wait in the queue. In the case of a tie, the longest waiting employee will handle the call. When no one is available immediately, the calls waits in the queue.
There are functionality available to improve customer service when callers are forced to wait in a queue. An ACD capable of callback capability will permit the caller to either accept a callback based on caller-id or leave a different callback number, while preserving the priority of the call. Another option is setting up multiple queues with same skill requirements but with different priority. This allows preferential treatment to customers who are valued based on a variety of factors. It is also possible to move calls from one queue to another after the lapse of a specified wait time where more employees (like supervisors) are available to handle the call.
With all this in mind, a Cloud contact center solution opens up the possibility for ACD call routing as more employees from different time-zones are included there by enhancing customer service.