With the help of an interactive voice responder (IVR), you have the tools to help callers to your inbound call center solve their problems or achieve their goals in the most efficient, painless way possible. One strategy that will help you do this is to edit and curate the options in the IVR to best suit the needs of your callers and the solutions they are looking for. While the best way to do this is to track calls and adjust your IVR and menu options as you go based on the calls you receive, there are also simple call routing strategies that can provide a starting point. Here are three of them.

 

  1. Route Calls in a Fixed Order

 

If you don’t have much data about the types of calls you are going to be receiving, if all your callers are going to be calling about the same thing (such as if your call center is receiving calls from people responding to an advertisement, for example), if all your agents are equipped to deal with any potential call situation, or if you aren’t expecting very high call volume, you may want to route calls in a fixed order. This simply means that calls will be added to a queue and dealt with in the order they were received.

  1. By Department

 

Routing calls by department is an effective strategy if your call center is dealing with a wide variety of situations, so much so that agents have only been trained to handle certain ones. The goal of call routing is to make the experience as efficient and easy for the caller as possible, so you don’t want to send them to somebody who does not know how to deal with their issue, which will only extend the call and stoke frustrations. If you are routing calls by department, you are adding menu options to the IVR that allow the caller to select the department best suited to deal with their problem.

 

  1. By Team

 

While routing calls by department puts the onus on the caller, routing calls by team is something you can do in the background. For example, say you have two teams of agents that typically split calls equally. But one day half the members of one team call in sick, or one team has multiple new agents starting on the same day. In these cases, you may want to route a lower percentage of calls to these teams, sending the majority to the team that has the skills and the manpower to work through them more efficiently and effectively.

One of the benefits of using CallShaper for your inbound call center is that these things are incredibly easy to adjust and tweak as you go in order to optimize the caller experience. To learn about more of the call center processes that CallShaper simplifies, request a demo today.