Call routing

What is automated call routing?

So, what is call routing? In essence it’s the funneling of incoming calls to the correct people or departments. Automatic call routing, by extension, is a call management feature (commonly found in telephony and contact center software) that automatically distributes incoming calls according to criteria that you’ve set based on your contact center's or team's capacity.

The benefits of automated intelligent call routing are huge—especially if you run a small business or are understaffed or under-resourced. Traditionally, businesses needed to hire a person just to direct calls to the right team members or departments. That was their entire job.

Not anymore. Now, a good communications platform or phone system can automatically route calls for you, allowing you to provide an excellent customer experience with low call wait times—while making sure callers get to the most skilled agents for their particular questions.

Different types of call routing rules

How does call routing work in practice? That’s largely up to you. You can choose the call routing rules which you wish to apply to your inbound calls. The following four are some of the most common:

Fixed order

Fixed order call routing—also sometimes known as sequential routing—is one of the simplest types of call routing rules. It involves directing calls to recipients in a fixed, sequential order.

Let’s look at a simple call routing example that applies this rule:

1. Your business has five agents for answering calls. You number them from one to five.

2. With fixed order call routing, when a call comes in, it gets routed to agent number one.

3. If another call comes in while agent number one is busy, it then gets routed to agent number two.

4. Agent three will only receive a call if both agents one and two are busy, and so on.

Round robin

Round robin call routing is a rule which aims to distribute calls more evenly amongst your agents.

Assuming the same set of five agents from our earlier example, this is how round robin routing would work:

1. The first call to your business gets routed to agent number one.

2. The second call is routed to agent number two, regardless of whether agent number one is available or not.

3. The third call goes to agent number three, and so on, until the sixth call which would go to agent number one again.

By idle time

This is a more complex type of call routing rule, which takes into account how active each agent has been on a given day or shift. When a call comes in, your system will automatically route it to whichever of your agents has been idle (meaning, not on a call) for the longest.

The idea behind call routing by idle time is to prevent certain agents from being overburdened by calls and to combat call avoidance by others. It helps in adherence to the twin call routing best practices of prioritizing customer experience and considering agent engagement.

Skills-based

Skills-based routing is made possible by a smart cloud phone system or call center software. A caller provides information via the solution’s IVR menu about the nature of their query or call.

The system will already have been furnished with information about each agent’s knowledge level and skillsets. It then matches the most appropriate agent to the call, according to the information the caller provides.

Benefits of an effective call routing service

An efficient call routing system is a necessity for any business that receives a high volume of inbound calls. Being able to handle and manage those calls effectively is good for your customers, your staff, and your bottom line.

For customers

When a customer reaches out to a business over the phone, they typically have similar expectations. They expect to get through to you (at least, reasonably) quickly and they expect you to be able to answer their question or solve their problem.

The best call routing software—when properly set up—can help on both counts. By establishing sensible call routing rules, you can ensure that calls to your business are connected to agents as quickly as possible.

What’s more, if you implement smarter call routing services—like skills-based routing—each caller is more likely to speak to someone who can solve their issue straight away. That makes for happier customers.

For agents or staff members

Without automated call routing, the jobs of your agents or customer support representatives will be harder.

Firstly, someone will have to take charge of manually routing calls to the right people, which is a time-consuming task. It’s also not a task that makes best use of an individual’s problem-solving abilities.

Beyond that, without automated call routing solutions, waiting times for customers will—by necessity—be longer. That’s liable to lead to unhappier callers for agents to deal with.

Those unhappy callers who have already waited a long time to speak to someone will also likely have little remaining patience. They probably won’t respond well to being placed back on hold or transferred to another agent. Unfortunately, both of those scenarios are made more likely if they’ve been inefficiently routed.

For the wider business

In and of themselves, happier customers and more content agents are both a positive thing for any business. However, the benefits of call routing extend to other elements of the wider business, too.

Most notably, effective call routing can help to lower a business’s operational costs. It makes it easier for the business to handle higher call volumes, without the expense of having to hire additional staff.

What’s more, the balanced workloads and more patient callers that effective call routing can deliver may have another knock-on benefit. When agents’ day-to-day work is made more comfortable, staff turnover is likely to be lower. Hiring and onboarding costs, therefore, may fall.

Call routing with Dialpad

Sign up with Dialpad to get a robust AI-powered collaboration platform that comes with call routing, unlimited calling (within your country, the US, and Canada), call tracking, video meetings, and more—all in one app. (Or, if you run a contact center, get a demo to see how call routing could work for you.)

Setting up call routing for small business with Dialpad

Small business call routing is easy to set up with Dialpad

1. Log into your account or in your web browser on dialpad.com, then navigate to Admin Settings.

2. From there, go to Departments > Business Hours & Call Handling > Call Routing.

3. Choose Edit Call Routing. (You can customize this for your business hours, with one set of routing for your open hours and another for your closed hours.)

4. Here, you'll be able to route phone calls either to your "Operators" (or whoever on your team is responsible for taking calls) or to other options like voicemail, another department, or an automated voice response. That's it!