The telephone provides us with a convenient way to communicate. Companies are only too glad to have an easy way to reach their clients. Their clients took advantage of easy communication links to convey their concerns to companies which provided them some form of service or product. Soon there were so many incoming calls seeking information or issue resolution that companies were forced to hire multiple people to handle them. When calls still continued to grow call centers offering specialized call handling services to every type of business became popular alternatives to hiring in-house phone receptionists as they were called then.
But even professionally trained call center agents have limits. When calls became more than their agents can handle, the first impulse of contact centers were to hire more people. There were problems with that: it is hard to find and train good call center agents, and hiring more people is a very expensive option. So the call centers turned to better training and equipment they were seeking to improve call handling efficiency so they will require less skilled people. While they succeeded initially, the proliferation of phones soon had them scrambling to find a way to handle the volume of incoming calls from clients. Industry associations like the Contact Centre Nova Scotia are never satisfied and seek to continuously improve call center performance.
The most effective way contact centers have found to handle large volumes of incoming calls is to use what is known as an acd call center, a type of inbound call center solution ; acd is an acronym for automatic call distribution. Now it seems the call centers have found a relatively inexpensive way to accommodate calls from thousands of clients with ease.
With automatic call distribution software incoming calls are routed systematically at a pace much faster than humans can achieve on their own. ACD uses a complex algorithm to route calls to call center agents. The software takes into account information from or about the caller, the phone line the caller dialed, the caller’s are code, availability of call center agents, the skill level of the agent and rules provided by their client company. Calls are more accurately distributed using these data, allowing the call center to respond confidently to the client. Learn more about automatic call distribution by visiting www.unisrc.com.
The acd call center is often complimented by interactive voice response (IVR) and computer telephony integration. IVR aids in speedy routing of calls to the right person by allowing the client to narrow down the choices based on his needs. This is usually done by asking the client to punch a series of numbers that correspond to the type of call, product or information he requires.
Computer telephony integration helps the call center agent resolve issues faster. The feature provides the agent information about the client, previous call history and other previously collected data during the duration of the call. Armed with the information the call center agent is able to sound authoritative and completely aware of the client’s concerns; the shorter duration enables him to handle more calls. This is how software helps handle large volumes of incoming calls.