Call routing is a critical function of an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). Routing strategy is an abstract term indicating the measure of the flexibility available within an ACD governing its call routing capability. The strategy available within a PBX is different from the routing options within a sophisticated ACD. For an incoming call, the destination end point in a PBX is an extension. When deployed with an ACD, it is an ACD agent using the PBX extension. The ACD agents are part of different groups within the setup of a sophisticated call center software. Typically agent groups are trained to handle specific business functions. All incoming calls for these business functions would be part of one or more queues.
Skills are a big part of grouping. Skills based routing is by far the most popular form of grouping. It is an answering strategy, where higher skilled agents answer calls ahead of others. Queues require skills and agents have skills with a certain level of expertise. Skills therefore associate agents to queues. When multiple agents are available to answer a call in a queue, it will be answered by the higher skilled agent. If skill levels are equal, the longer waiting agent will get the call.
Overflows and Service Level Agreement (SLA) dictate the maximum duration a call is allowed to stay in a queue waiting for an available agent. Once the maximum wait time is reached, the call routing strategy will route this call based on SLA and overflow business rules. If good statistical data is available, predictive routing could be setup, where the routing rules kick in based on anticipated maximum wait time.
Routing of calls starts with the arrival of incoming calls through DID/DDI/DNIS. Calls can be routed to any Queue directly from the arriving DID or through user IVR (Interactive Voice Response) interaction. This provides the first opportunity to route based on priority and skills. Queues skills are an indication of the type of calls that are being routed into the queue. A simple example would be a queue for customer service in English. Here the skills associated with queue can be “Customer Service” and “English” or “Customer Service English”.
Another attribute for a queue is priority. Queue priority is an indication of the relative importance of the call. It is possible that there could be two queues with identical skills, one being a regular queue and the other, a premium based service for special customers.
As seen above, routing dictates where the calls are sent to with Overflow and SLA influencing the routing decisions. In a PBX type line routing, is sending a call towards a extension considering its availability to take calls. This could also happen when an ACD transfers calls to end points without consideration for the answer strategy. Such transfers will send the call to another PBX or ACD. This selective routing could be round-robin, linear or most-idle.
As we can see, Skills based Routing with ACD agents is an answering strategy integrated into routing where as line routing is a “Hunting” strategy. Older legacy systems use various terminologies to refer to different aspects of routing. Modern next generation systems like Q-Suite have routing strategies built-in to their powerful Call-flow Builder. This provides the necessary integration of routing and answering strategies for ACD queues with skills based routing. This combination of routing and call answer strategy empowers call center operators to route and respond to calls in the most appropriate way, increasing productivity and bringing down costs.