OVERVIEW

The whole notion of an automatic call distributor (analog, digital or VoIP) is to ration caller demand across as few possible company resources as possible without compromising sales or customer satisfaction. The resources may be live agents (inbound, outbound and/or web call back requests) or other channels such as interactive voice response ports. The goal is to apply these scarce resource across as large a caller demand as possible, and do so in a manner as transparent to the customer requesting service as possible, while never compromising the business goal.

It s about balancing good customer service, good employee working conditions, against the lowest expense to revenue ratio as possible. An ACD goes a long way toward achieving this and is the most advanced model for most real-time customer requests available. Use of a good workload forecasting and planning package can dramatically assist in matching this customer demand to company resources, live and automated.

Call routing or workflow distribution tables are workflow distribution rules. Across the breadth of vendors, the processes appear similar although they are filled with nuances and subtleties critical to a customer contact center. This process is the core of customer contact center management and it must be understood clearly before selection of an ACD is made. Operating costs are directly and dramatically impacted by how these routing tables operate.

Call routing, workflow distribution and call-processing tables are sets of preprogrammed steps that reside in system memory, and may be a standard set of steps programmed...