When should you consider a Call Routing Service?

As customer demands continue to increase and business communication becomes more complicated, the question is no longer whether or not call routing services USA will be important, but rather when to invest in a dedicated call routing system. For many businesses, the timing for this investment arrives earlier than anticipated, typically as a result of persistent but subtle operational issues.

The Growing Pains Moment

There comes a point during a business's growth where a business is unable to respond to incoming calls. Customers express frustration with the long wait times on hold, and/or the business is simply overwhelmed with phone calls. When this happens, it is typically due to the inability of a company's administrative/ reception desk to keep pace with the number of calls coming in, as well as handle calls from all departments and/or multiple locations. Investing in a call routing service allows businesses to distribute calls to several departments or locations immediately, providing a solution to the call congestion at the reception desk. This is particularly important for organizations that have experienced rapid growth and can no longer effectively manage phone calls within the "forward to mobile" option that was used when the business was a start-up.

Additionally, companies that are expanding their operations to multiple locations or have hired remote employees who reside in various time zones have additional call routing challenges when managing phone calls. Changing an organization's routing structure can complicate manual call management, as it makes it difficult for businesses to get customers to the appropriate person regardless of where that person is located, and therefore provides the illusion of seamless communication while effectively masking the complexity of the operations.

The Need to Enhance Customer Experience

Consider using routing programs when the ability to provide customers with the best experiences becomes an important competitive differentiator for your company. For instance, if other companies are responding more quickly or providing more customized services, routing can help you respond quicker and provide a customized service that is comparable to or exceeds those of your competitors. Also, skill-based routing ensures that when a complex question is asked, the call is routed immediately to a specialist; whereas, with VIP routing, your most valuable customers are given priority.

When communication breakdowns result in lost revenue, the urgency for implementing routing systems will increase. If an applicant says he or she "could not get through" or a customer states he or she was "transferred several times," these incidents are creating unnecessary costs that routing systems can reduce significantly. The benefits of implementing routing far outweigh the costs associated with the lost revenue created by poor call center services USA.

Your Company Needs to Improve Operationally

When labor costs relating to the manual routing of calls begin to take a large portion of your company's operational budget, an assessment of how to improve those operations is warranted. In other words, if you are using dedicated employees to simply answer and transfer calls, implementing routing can dramatically reduce your labor costs and improve the accuracy of your call routing by using automation. By doing so, your service provides a return on investment through allowing your employees to concentrate on revenue-producing activities instead of on the administrative task of transferring calls.

One reason for utilizing call routing is for business continuity; for example, an organization may not be able to go offline (due to any number of causes, including technical faults, natural disasters, etc.), so utilizing call routing with failover options to backup call numbers and mobile devices offers an enormous advantage to these types of organizations. Also, this feature will help organizations that have employees on call and that also provide emergency services or require time-sensitive responses from customers.

Analytics for Business Decisions

If you don't have visibility into your communication metrics, you should consider utilizing call routing solutions. A modern call routing solution can provide you with analytics that include call volume patterns, peak hours, average wait time, and abandonment rate. Having this data is a critical component of being able to make informed staffing decisions, to identify employee training needs, and to measure the quality of your service. When you make business decisions about your phone system based on data that is not based on facts, you are operating on assumptions.

All businesses that utilize call-in support to customers, e.g., e-commerce, medical practices managing patient calls, and legal firms that must deal with urgent client matters, as well as all businesses running marketing campaigns, should have a sophisticated routing strategy from the very beginning. In addition, seasonal businesses that experience dramatic increases or declines in volume need the ability to scale their call-routing services as needed.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the key decision is the importance of the quality of communication on your success as a business. If missed calls equal missed opportunities, if customer satisfaction relies on getting to the correct expert promptly, and/or if your current call routing technology creates difficulties for either your employees or customers, then now is the time to explore a new call-routing solution. With Instavo IP advancements and affordability of call-routing technology today, small companies have the same access to enterprise-level capabilities that larger corporations do, so the determining factor is no longer the size of the company, but rather the types of communication solutions that are priorities for each organization.