Contact Solutions Blog

Contact Automation Best Practice: Ensure IVRs Route Calls Based on Agent Skill Set

A contact automation best practice is to ensure that the IVRs have the ability to send calls to live agents based on the rep’s skill set, if needed. For example, an insurance company client of ours recently needed a way to manage employee requests for a new HR program they were launching. To simplify the launch, they planned to send all calls to one skill-set in the call center.  We knew this would lead to difficulties once the application was launched and communicated to them that skills routing would be more effective. However the application was launched as is. Unfortunately, this decision led to complications.

As the application was being prepared for launch, they trained the CSR’s to handle specific questions, some that required more in-depth knowledge than others.  When the IVR application launched, this specific training went for naught because they did not prepare to direct callers to the right resource, based on skill-set.

Sure enough, on the second day of launch they came to CSI in a panic because their customers were frustrated with the CSR’s inability to answer calls properly. Their call center was flooded with calls they couldn’t route properly.

We were ready for them when they called the next day.  The CSI CTI implementation is based on the best practice that all IVRs should have the ability to send calls to multiple skill-sets.  Once the customer provided us with new skill sets, we were able to quickly update the IVR to route calls appropriately. This action took days, not weeks, to get going.

The client’s queue times dropped and customer satisfaction greatly improved. And by segmenting the calls in the contact center, our customer benefitted by being able to get better reporting. We are using that data for future continuous improvement.

Tags: IVR