Using Data to Route Calls in Your Contact Center

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time Now it's time for me- on R&B. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This isn't a voluntary with creative minds and ambitious people. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people, like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of the Expivia- Interaction Marketing Group and the Call Center Geek himself, Tom Laird. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Advice from a Call Center Geek. The Call Center Contact Center podcast, we try to give you some action, but it was taking your contact center, improve the overall quality as I record this. I've talked so much over the last couple days and again I have to just remember this is a podcast so you could be listening to this like three years down the road from now but we- spoke so much on I, I just keep calling it airline support again, you know, the Christmas season of product to, you know, a giant storm has really knocked southwest and a lot of of other airlines, really to their heels, we've seen a lot of breakdowns in the customer support model from a lot of them.

01:56So it's got my thoughts going on a lot of different topics. Different topics. One of them is, which I did an episode yesterday where we kind of talked about the different, what happens when hell breaks loose? You need to quickly figure out, how do I get these hundreds or thousands of calls we now have in queue, that we were not expecting, what do we do with them? And again, that's not a, I mean, there are a couple things, obviously, you can do at, but that is more of an infrastructure and planning, I think, then, in making sure that you're ready to go with some of those things. So today, I wanted to talk about some ways that we can route, cause I think that was a topic yesterday that I kind of brought up. And then I got a bunch of questions, especially our tick talk, um, on, on what are some of the kind of the unique ways that that contact centers can route calls.

02:51And I wanted to throw some of, these out at you guys. And these are all things that I'm we're doing right now in our call center. Right. So I have, have some, you know, kind of upfront experience with some of this. Some of this is really cool. I would say 90% of this would do it. Cause I'm going to talk about some things that I think are.a coming, um, some people that I've. I've talked to on, on routing calls based on voice, personality, and those kind of things, which I think is really cool as the AI model starts to evolve. The first thing is, you know, there's two different ways that you can route, right? There's kind of the basic way, there's the advanced way. A lot of smaller call centers think that, you know, data the data integration is maybe beyond them. So they just keep the regular telephony platform. And you can only do so much with that, right? You can segment calls, you know, based on skills, right? Skills basically is kind of a, either a, either a, either a phone number. So if you have one phone call, one phone number coming in, 1-800-555-55, right? It comes into your IVR. You can then segment those calls, you know, either based on customer, based on needs. So you can have customer support, tech support, logistics, sales, I think we understand that those can be routed to reps.

04:04a little bit about this, that's about, there's some other ways and I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the AI things in AI on move. For the more, you can get, I guess, pretty technical with that if you want,, but it's not that unique or cool. So if you get into the really cool, unique stuff, you have to bring in data, right? And we look at routing off of actual CRM data And it doesn't just have to be their Annie and Annie, meaning their phone number. It doesn't just have to be named. We can go deep into the list if we have fields filled out to route specific customers based on some type of criteria that we have in their CRM. - Let's talk a couple ways that we can do this. So now we are assuming we have tight integrations with either an off-the-shelf CRM, a Salesforce, a Zoho, a Zendesk, or or a, even a full proprietary CRM that maybe your organization uses that you have built out.

05:06And then through API connectivity, connections can be made really no no matter what, as long as there's fields and there's data that we can quote unquote read, right? So, I think the number one thing is customer segmentation is things, but just like off the top of my head, you know, the first one that always comes to mind is high value customers, right? So again, I keep using this airlines are kind of just right in my head. So let's say, you know, you're a, you know, five million miler, right on XY at XYZ airline, you know, you would probably have a concierge and some special phone numbers for you. But let's just say that you call customer support. Well, as soon as that call then gets answered, it's going to go look at the data, see if anything is tagged, of you being a high value customer, you are, so then boom, you can move to the front of the queue, one to get your call answered. So I think that's, there's a really embattled kind of cool example of back in the day, we had, we worked for a very,

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06:17very large bank, and one of the board of directors had their car declined for some weird reason. We are heavy in queue and that person, you know, waited in queue for like, they said 10 minutes was said 10 minutes was probably like a minute 30, right? But anyway, they waited. And we heard about, So after that, we, we made sure that they will call boom. They will go right to the front of the line. So that's one customer segmentation, high value customers, you know, another one is biggest need, right? So if you can anything that you work your data with, and you C. C..-

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08:10really cool and things that, and I think really shows how powerful this is. If you have a client and they have thousands of financial advisors, they have lots of different ways to get the One of the ways is to have outbound or emails or direct mail, customer calls in, schedule an appointment. So we don't want to just be a blanket, financial advisors in. We wanted they wanted us to be able to answer the phone with their actual financial advisor that this customer has We said okay, so they use Salesforce. So as calls come in All right, that once millisecond looks at the data, at the Annie the record of record of that customer finds what financial advisor they have and then that data then goes to our rep on their screen pops the screen with proper scripting and with you know what services company. a piece we are able to route calls to not only pop, screens and pop data, but maybe I have dealt with this customer three or I'm going to be the first look to get that call so that they hear my voice again.

09:48I think that that just, kind of, improves the customer experience and gets a little bit of familiarity with it. There's a lot of unique things that are just kind of demoed with a

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10:21to tell inflection in their voice and give a, you know, a 92 or 97% chance that this is that. So using voice to authenticate is nothing new certain agents that maybe are more to the point. If we can match those personalities together, that customer experience. Nathan here has a question. How is new data. Your CRM It's all we are doing is utilizing that data to the I think the good way is you can update records really fast in a database. If we say, hey, we want to take these customers and offer them a special promotion with a recording. We can update that in one. So then when they call the special recording. And we don't, we don't have to really do anything, you know, other than just, you know, making sure that our data is right from a really quick setup and a standpoint. So I I think working with data is the telephony Let's just talk about engaging, right?

12:28So not so much from a routing standpoint, but you know, we've all heard of the, All right. So if you.

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13:02on Monday, Tuesdays, like, you know, from a budgetary standpoint, they knew we were gonna queue, but being able to implement those kind of things from a customer experience standpoint, raise our sentiment scores, or, raise their clients' sentiment scores, you know, 15 to 20%. So I think that that is a unique tool unique tool that we, we're utilizing in queue. The other things that, you know, I think are really, really cool is, And I know most forms have something like this. In fact, what the heck it was the business advocate. That's what it was. It's called the business advocate. It was Avaya had this product and this was we're talking like early 2000s. And, I thought it was like the most genius thing ever. And basically what it does is let's say we have multiple queues. You know, you have, let's say customer support and let's just, yeah, let's just do this easy.

13:58Cause I always give like four or five different skills get confused. So let's just say we have sales and we have service and we know that we probably want our sales calls or most organizations probably want their sales calls answered before their service calls. Now, again, I'm simplifying this. I understand that we promulgate use skills based routing and we could prioritize different agents, but let's say, no, it gets too confusing, right? Because again, I'm only using two skills, but this could be done done over 10. We need this to be at a 90 10. So 90% of the calls and our sales queue, 90% of the calls answer within 10 seconds or less. And this will be an 8030 80% of the calls answer within 30 seconds or less. So what the business advocate did. And now with a lot of these platforms, it's CX one cause of workforce intelligence is it's using AI and it's using algorithms to basically predict a queue, you know, and it can look at things like workforce management, your forecast, your interval forecast to say understand what time periods, the heaviest times, when it's expecting calls, what it's seeing.

15:01And the IVR. So taking all this data into account, and without a human being, it can, can move agents over from your service queue or skill to make sure that we stay at this 90-10. So it's moving the back and forth kind of all day long, making sure that this is as as close as it can be to an 80-30, but our priority is this to be a 90-90, 90-90, 90-90-90, 90-90-90, We can do that on a service level. You can do this on handle time. So let's say you have a new agent and we say, hey, if anytime the new agent, if their handle time goes over six minutes, we're going to drop their priority level down from one where everybody's at and maybe a three so that they start to take less calls. aAnd then once they work their handle time back down to that 559, boom boom, they go back to a one and they can start to to take calls. Kind of routing, you're kind of telling the system where calls are going to and you're trying to get the customer to the best agent or at least to the business rule that we are trying to have, whether it be a service level or a handle time with that. So I think that's a really cool and unique way to kind of look at how we route calls we route calls as well.

16:38So again, that is very general. I mean, I could talk on this stuff really all day long, but again, I think the main point of this is to, to in 2023, if you don't have your telephony and your data integrated, you need to look to do that a and build that out. it's not that expensive, even from a programming standpoint, if you have one of the high end telephony platforms, if you have a nice CX one, the Genesys, the five, nine, the talk desk, the, the you jet, the, you know, Amazon connect, any of those where we'll have prebuilt integrations already into Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, and a, and a wide variety, you know, teams, wide variety, Microsoft dynamics, I can keep going on, of CRM's. And then it may take a little bit more work if you have your own I think that that's something that you could do, especially, especially if we have an economic a little bit of a downturn.

17:38Maybe you have some not as big as it was. It's a great way to spend budget that you will improve your customer experience. it will open your eyes to a lot of different ways to route specifically to either specific agents or have certain customers segment that you can improve customer experience from maybe high value or somebody who's really, really in need at that time. So that's kind of what I got for you guys for today. Again, this whole snowstorm, snowmageddon has, just spurred so many different thoughts and things that I think can add some value as I've been kind of thinking like, what would I do if I was the call center manager, if I I was in charge of that floor at Southwest? Not only would I now, but what are some of the things that - in the future, from an infrastructure standpoint, do we really need to look at? And I think there'll be studies and talks about this in our industry for a very, very long time, but these are just some of my initial thoughts. So again, I will not be doing another podcast this year. So again, as I do this, it's the 28th of December. So I hope you guys had a Merry Christmas. Have a great new year. I will talk to all of you guys in 2023.