How ACD Call Center Software Overhauls the Customer Experience

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) call center software is one of the core components of a well-oiled call center.

Of all the tools call centers use to control the flow of outbound and inbound calls, ACD call center software is the central technology that helps lower average call center queue time.

And this is crucial for maintaining a great customer experience.

Why?

People hate being on hold. But what’s more disturbing is that 34% of customers who hang up while on hold won’t call back. That doesn’t mean everyone who hangs up while on hold is going to churn, leave a negative return or affect their business relationship negatively – but it will for many.

Call centers need to avoid this at all costs.

We’ll look at how ACD call center software can reduce the amount of time a caller is on hold and other ways it creates a more enjoyable customer experience.

How ACD Call Center Software Improves the Customer Experience

ACD call center software has numerous features that improve the customer experience. Below we highlight 4 features that make this technology worthwhile to implement in any call center.

Customers Can Self-Cure and Self-Serve

Through the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, callers are given pre-recorded commands for answering their questions themselves.

The IVR system will present callers with various choices, from paying their bills to hearing operations hours to connecting with a live agent or transferring to a specific department.

The IVR system’s most important function is to help callers who have low-level concerns to quickly resolve them without tying up the resources of live agents.

This obviously helps keep call center queue’s much less crowded.

Of course, call centers shouldn’t overdo it with this technology by creating layers of complex selections, but the IVR should be robust enough to handle a fair amount of inquiries before a caller needs to speak with an agent.

And, for those who must be connected to an agent, ACD sorts them – TCN’s ACD can help sort by agent skill, urgency, customer keyword – you name it.

Customers Can Choose to Wait for a Callback from a Live Agent

In the intro to this post, we brought up how detrimental it can be when callers have to wait on hold. But that’s for callers who have to wait with their ears glued to the side of their phone. There is a way to have callers wait to speak to an agent that is less irritating, and it’s called queue callback.

Queue callback allows customers to select an option that lets them hang up and wait for an agent to return their call.

This means customers can go about their daily business free from distraction, fully confident that they will receive a call to get their question answered when an agent has the time to call them.

This reduces pressure on agents to give half-hearted answers in order to take the next call, increasing their productivity. It also makes customers more comfortable waiting to be helped.

Customers are Directed to Agents Who Can Best Handle Their Needs

Call queuing sometimes takes the form of a linear ticketing system, where the first caller in line gets answered by the first available agent and so on down the list of calls.

This can work fine at first, especially if a call center is staffed with agents who possess similar skills as one another, but it’s not optimal.

If you have agents of varying skills – some are closers and some work better with new customers, for example – ACD call center software can determine which agent the caller should speak to. The software figures this out by looking at the caller’s history, any information available about the caller, their actions on the IVR, and the agents available at the time of the call.

Call Centers Can Forecast Future Call Volumes (and Staff Accordingly)

ACD call center software will keep track of call volumes over time. When planning how many agents you need to staff on any given day, you can look back at this data and plan accordingly.

This is referred to as capacity planning. It uses business intelligence (BI) to strategically forecast and plan for the future.

The steps involved are fairly straightforward:

• Record the volume of calls in a day, week, or month.
• Forecast call volumes using any one of these 3 systems: point estimate, average estimate, time series estimate.
• Put together monthly, weekly, and even hourly forecasts to effectively staff the call center.

The Benefits of Cloud Call Center Software Beyond the ACD System

The ACD system is only one benefit of cloud call center software that’s driving many managers and executives to switch from legacy systems to this solution.

Discover the rest of the benefits in our free ebook you can download instantly.