A telephone system called an automated call distribution system, or ACD for short, is used to answer incoming calls and route them to particular terminals or agents inside a company. In order to guide callers based on the customer’s choice, phone number, chosen incoming line to the system, or time of day the call was handled, ACDs frequently employ a voice menu. The top ACD service provider is Contaque.
Callers are first greeted by a recording before hearing an interactive voice response (IVR) menu. The IVR menu asks the caller to choose an option using their voice or the touch-tone keypad on the phone in order to gather information about the reason for the call. Prior to being sent to an agent, calls are sorted into a queue and given a priority. This might involve time-based queuing, where callers are routed to the next available agent regardless of their purpose for calling, or skill-based routing, where the consumer connects with a person who best matches their issue.
While routing calls is the main purpose of ACD, there are a number of additional capabilities you can use in conjunction with it to boost productivity at all points of contact throughout your whole company. ACD has features that improve the caller experience, increase agent efficiency, and give management meaningful data for contact center optimization.
ACD solutions would be particularly useful for busy call centers and companies with large call volumes. Businesses with lower call volumes will yet profit from their own ACD as the workforce decentralizes. You’ll need to use automated reasoning to choose which member of a support staff of 10 who are dispersed over an entire continent should answer a call.
ACDs commonly rely on a skills-based routing engine that intelligently routes digital and voice interactions to the right agents. An intelligent routing engine matches customer requests to agents based on skills, customer data, real-time contact center performance, customer sentiment and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered behavioral profiles. It consolidates routing across inbound and outbound, digital and voice, agent assisted and self-service channels. The ACD ensures every interaction is routed to the best available agent in the least amount of time.
- Personalized customer experiences – by ensuring that customer records are available for data-driven routing and to personalize interactions throughout the customer journey
- Connecting customers to the right agents – intelligent routing matches customer requests based on skills, natural language analytics and AI-powered behavioral profiles
- Empowering business users with a simple and intuitive interface to create an maintain skills-based routing flows based on changing business needshe ACD system utilizes a rule-based routing strategy, based on a set of instructions that dictates how inbound calls are handled and directed. These rules are often simply based on guiding a caller to any agent as fast as possible, but multiple variables may be added, all with the end goal of connecting the customer is with a qualified agent as quickly as possible. Matching and routing literally thousands of calls to the correct agent is a difficult task, and is often done in concert with an interactive voice response (IVR) system to better determine the customer needs.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that lets users interact with an automated answering machine before they are sent to an agent. They are commonly used to determine what the user’s query is and, by extension, the kind of assistance they need.
IVRs do this by asking the user to press keys on their phone that corresponds to their issue. For example, an IVR might ask you to “Press 1 if you want to purchase a product.” The ACD will then take your response and directly contact sales agents rather than send you to unrelated departments.
So IVR is used to collect customer data. ACD then uses that data to sort and distribute the calls. When used together, these two tools can really improve customer satisfaction and workforce engagement in your call center.
Now let’s take a more in-depth look at the distribution process to get a better understanding of how the entire system all works.
The last step is call routing. The ACD will route the calls based on your preferred type of distribution method.
Want to minimize customer waiting time? The ACD can distribute the incoming call to whoever’s immediately available. Want your customer to be handled by the best agent? You can set the system to distribute based on an agent’s skills.
There are many types of distribution methods for you to choose from. To help you determine which one is the best for your business, let’s look at the most commonly-used methods in call centers.
Anyone who’s ever worked in a call center knows how difficult it is when customers call at the same time. Which caller do you prioritize first? What if there are no more agents available to talk?
One way call centers prevent problems like these is by having a good ACD system. So, let’s take a look at what ACD is, what tools it has to improve your customer engagement, and how it can benefit your business as a whole.
