The handling of customer, prospect, or third party calls by organizations is imperative to their reputation, delivery of products, and retention and growth of customer base. Effective call management can even drive sales, both by maintaining or increasing satisfaction and by discovering opportunities to establish or deepen relationships beyond an initial call issue.
Many organizations using call centers use a queuing method, which suffers from many drawbacks pitting utilization against performance. Underutilized call centers waste organizational resources, but over-utilized call centers will lag in performance (e.g., time to response, time to resolution) to the frustration of callers.
United Services Automobile Association developed event- and agent-based call routing to advance beyond earlier queueing methods. New load balancing algorithms and propensity models were developed to deepen industry understanding of call routing solutions and drive interaction with callers.
However, a number of competing parameters still exist in all call routing techniques. Call center networks and their subordinate entities would benefit from additional techniques for solving, utilizing, and reconciling disparate call and routing parameters.