While 75% of UK contact centres use IVR for call routing, for most this simply means a variant of pressing 1 for sales and 2 for service. Predictive intelligent routing means you can personalise service while cutting call times and improving first-call resolution.

Being confident about the actual reason your customer is calling means that you can put the right agent on the call, and have all of the relevant information at their fingertips, saving time and improving the customer experience.

While basic call routing is useful for cutting time from the early part of a call, the insight that this functionality provides is often limited.

While half of UK contact centres state that they know something about the subject the customer wants to discuss, this is likely to be limited to knowing which department they want to speak with.

Only a minority even identify the customer fully pre-call, and very few try to find the agent who last spoke to them. More than one-quarter of contact centres have their agents go into a call with no idea whatsoever who the customer is or what they want to talk about.

Predictive intelligent routing means that there can be an instantaneous gathering and assessment of relevant data from multiple sources even before the call has been routed, supporting the accurate prioritisation and delivery of the call.

For example, an airline contact centre may judge a call to be urgent if the caller:

• Has booked a flight for this day
• Rarely calls the contact centre, preferring to use self-service
• Is a frequent flier
• Is calling from a mobile phone rather than a landline
• Shares a similar profile with other customers who only tend to call for very urgent reasons.

Here, there is a likelihood that the call is directly related to the flight that is happening today (e.g. there’s a danger of missing the flight and the customer may need to rebook), and is able to move the call to the front of the queue and route it to an agent experienced in changing flights, and whose communication style suits the situation and customer profile.

Within the call, an AI system can augment the conversation with suggestions based upon what the agent is doing on the screen and also, through listening to the details of the conversation, is able to provide relevant information without the agent having to search for it, such as the next flight to the customer’s proposed destination or the refund / transfer options. At the end of the call, the system sends the agreed resolution to the customer without the agent having to do this manually.

While it may not always be possible to do so, some businesses try to pass customers through to an agent who has positively dealt with their enquiry before, which can be a very effective way of personalising the customer experience - assuming that agent is actually available when needed.

A branch of predictive analytics – predictive behavioural routing – goes a step further, using insights gathered from historical calls and the analysis of customer communication types to choose an agent with skills and characteristics most likely to give a positive response to the next caller in the queue.

Predictive behavioural routing uses millions of algorithms to decode the language used by agents and customers, in order to understand their state of mind, personality, communication style, engagement levels, empathy and transactional attributes (such as ability to overcome objections, willingness to sell, success rates, the number of times that supervisor assistance is required, etc.).

Through analysing historical interactions, each customer can be matched against a specific personality style. When this customer calls again, they are identified through the IVR or CLI, and the call is then routed to an agent whose performance when interacting with this specific personality type has been seen to be positive.

This increase in empathy and the matching of communication styles has seen these matched agent-customer pairings get significantly higher sales closure rates and better customer satisfaction scores.

The opportunities for true customer personalisation – starting before the customer has even spoken a word – are growing rapidly.

To find out more, ContactBabel’s new report – “The Inner Circle Guide to Customer Engagement & Personalisation” is available for free download from https://www.contactbabel.com/the-inner-circle-guide-to-customer-engagement-and-personalisation/