The Need for Web-Based Contact Distribution
Technology being what it is, it’s no wonder that web contact management has evolved into a labyrinth of disconnected channels.
Support organizations have long tracked phone calls through a case tracking or CRM application. Later, when companies opened up a “support@” address, they needed software to handle the flood of email that followed. Chat, VoIP, webforms, and instant messaging each brought their own software—usually built by vendors who specialized in each individual technology.
This proliferation of point tools is a significant barrier to delivering consistent, high-quality customer experiences. Those barriers must give way to unified queuing, routing, tracking, closing, and reporting on any eSupport request. In the traditional telephone-based call center, this functionality is provided by the Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system. The web requires an integrated, cross-channel version of the ACD.
ACDs Make Support Call Centers Work
The ACD is foundational technology for the call center. Although support center managers generally don’t think about ACDs very much anymore, they influence our language, or metrics, and our processes in fundamental ways.
The ACD provides:
- Distribution. The ACD allows a single 800 number to front-end a multitude of people working in different centers, potentially worldwide.
- Customer data collection. With interactive voice response (IVR) or voice portal components, the ACD collects basic information from customers in order to know how to handle the call. While much maligned and often misused, phone trees can provide a much better customer experience than blindly routing calls.
- Routing. Based on the customer’s input and their phone number, ACDs use rules to send each call to the group of people best suited to handle it.
- Queues. Rather than treating each employee individually, ACDs organize them into virtual queues to which staff are assigned based on demand, expertise, and interest. The first available employee receives the next call in any queue to which he or she is assigned.
- Time management. Employees can be taken off of available status during specific break times or for wrap-up time at the end of each call.
- Reporting. Most of the traditional operational metrics used to manage contact centers come directly from the ACD: average speed of answer, average handle time, abandonment rate, utilization, calls per analyst per day, and so on.
Channels Aren’t Managed Consistently
While point solutions for e-channel management provide some ACD-like functionality for their individual channel, there are few practical options for managing web contacts across channels.
For the largest contact centers, there are so-called Universal Queue (UQ) products from telephony vendors. UQs do provide an integrated cross-channel experience, but require complex and expensive premise-based installations that must be customized and maintained. The sophistication of these solutions—and their correspondingly high total cost of ownership—exceeds the budgets and ambitions of most support organizations. Because there has been no practical equivalent to the ACD for the web, the popular concept of the virtual contact center is, unfortunately, more theory than practice.
The result is a “lose-lose” for everyone because:
- Customers receive inconsistent treatment based on how they ask for support, and often have to repeat themselves as they’re transferred from person to person or channel to channel
- Support analysts get stuck in specific channels, and are frustrated that the customer experience isn’t as good as it should be
- Management struggles to manage a channel-segmented workforce, and doesn’t receive rolled-up reporting and analytics
- Customer loyalty erodes, damaging enterprises’ financial performance
Web-based ACDs Create the Integrated Support Center
With a single set of queues, one set of routing rules, a universal analyst interface, and integrated analytics, web-based ACDs enable the support center to provide consistent customer experiences with a shared group of analysts across chat, email, and other electronic channels. Consistent, easily configured user interfaces reinforce the brand and deliver a consistent customer experience.
