If you are receiving a lot of phone calls at your company you probably know how awkward it is when the client calls you and you do not know how to answer their question. You can either try to do your best to answer it or forward the call to the right department. This means wasting not only your time but also the time of your customer. You might think that even if it is not an effective system, there is nothing much to do, that the call forwarding is the only option. But, thanks to the development of new technologies we can offer you a much better way to distribute your phone calls. It is all about ACD contact center feature. ACD stands for Automatic Call Distributor, and it is a tool that distributes the phone calls in an intelligent and automatic way. It makes a fast analysis of the client’s needs and sends it to the most indicated agent. But, let’s take a quick look at it.
How the ACD contact center works
- The first step to do our call distribution is IVR (Interactive Voice Response). It collects the information about the caller, so the system will know what are his or her needs and who will be the most indicated agent to attend to the call. The IVR interacts with clients with voice messages and the clients can use their keypad to enter the information they want. It is a typical case of: “for sales press 1, for accounting press 2…”.
- Once the system knows all the information it needs, it sends the client to the call queue with the music on hold. The client remains in the queue until an agent is available to answer. It divides the amount of the calls depending on the traffic.
- Finally, it is time to use our ACD contact center system. With the information collected by IVR, ACD will automatically analyze what are the needs of every client and who will be the most indicated agent to answer it. How can it know that? Easy! The call manager can create a profile of every single agent, evaluating their skills.
For example, an agent’s skills could be evaluated as sales – 7, Spanish – 8, French – 5.
This way the system will know that this agent should attend to commercial calls of Spanish speaking clients, but when someone who speaks French calls, it will be better to send it to another agent, unless there is no one else available, and German speakers would never be sent to this agent. This is just an example, you can choose whatever criteria you wish.
Benefits of ACD contact center tool
- Improvement of agents’ productivity. If your agents have to know every single detail about your company in case the client ask them about it, he or she probably will not be able to give the best answer possible. But, if you divide the information between different agents depending on their skills, it will be the completely different case. If the agent has a smaller amount of information to remember, he or she will become an expert on the field and will be able to solve the clients’ problems very fast and in the best way possible. For that reason, the ACD is so important. It will increase the productivity of your agents and the satisfaction of your clients.
- Better resource management. When your agents do not waste time on forwarding calls or on trying to answer questions they really have no clue about, they could do other activities that add value to the company. As you know, time is money, so wasting your time to increase your costs. Using ACD can solve that problem for you and makes decrease the cost per call. In addition, our call center software includes also statistics, so you will know better your KPIs, like missed calls, average call time, waiting time etc. With that information you will know better how to optimize your resources, for example, you will know whether you need more or fewer agents.
- Connect multiple locations. If you have several offices in different locations, you do not have to hire different phone numbers. Since our ACD contact center is based on the cloud technology, it does not matter the physical location of your office. Your agents can work from wherever they want, you can even manage your call center from home, and the ACD still will to an accurate call distribution.
- Special treatment for special clients. Every company has clients who are more important, and losing them could mean the business failure. We need to pay special attention to them. Our ACD contact center gives you the opportunity to create a VIP list. You just need to add the numbers of your most important clients on the list, and when they call you their phone will be answered immediately, skipping the queue.
Those are just some of many advantages that ACD contact center feature can bring you, and there is no doubt that it will help you to create more effective and more productive contact center software. At Fonvirtual we offer you the best software for both, inbound and outbound call center. If you still have any doubt about how it works, we will be glad to give you any further information.
