12,000 call steering menus mapped by frustrated IT Manager

I was fascinated by the recent wide scale coverage by the BBC of the chap that managed to map 12,000 routes through to contact centre call steering menus.

I know caller experiences can be frustrating, but this seems a bit excessive!

I’m sure I won’t be first to tell him that by the time he had finished, I suspect the menus have all changed so the shortcuts in many cases won’t work anymore!

As a serious point though I do think this topic has been addressed by many contact centres already, and I certainly hope by the ones that Sabio work with. This has often been done by:

• Better design of options
• Removing needless options that are only used for MI purposes
• And the reduction of route point by increased multi-skilling of agents

For many contact centres though even these approaches do not make things as easy for callers as it could be.

Also, there is an increased overhead in maintaining skills in a heavily multi-skilled environment.

There are of course solutions available that allow organisations to reap the benefits of skill focus whilst making calls easy for callers.

Intelligent Call Routing

Sabio advocates the use of Intelligent Call Routing (ICR) solutions to use data that you know about the client in order to route the caller more effectively.

For example, if you know a caller already has an insurance policy, is there any need to ask him if his call is about buying an insurance policy?

This paradigm can be extended to many attributes such as:

• Recent call patterns
• Callers returning your call
• Outstanding issues
• Etc.

Using this intelligence allows you to focus on the options that really have most relevance.

In cases where there really are too many options even with ICR, a complimentary technology that Sabio can supply is Natural Language call steering.

These solutions really do allow the caller to express their call reason in their own words and lets the technology figure out how best to route!

These solutions:

• Gain high user acceptance
• Allow optimised agent tasking and utilisation
• Provide great call reason tracking
• And can drive full automation!

So thanks to the BBC for raising the topic!