When you’re hungry, few things are more satisfying than a big plate of spaghetti. Twirling your fork into a hearty tangle of pasta is a culinary delight. Yet, for IT professionals responsible for contact center routing, the thought of spaghetti often conjures up less than tantalizing images of their platform’s tangled web of disparate communication channels and applications.

With the surge in mobile and explosion of digital channels, routing has become undeniably complex. Customers now expect seamless engagement across channels, along with personalized, contextual interactions. Yet, voice-centric, PBX/ACD contact center platforms were never intended to support this level of customer engagement, nor the fast-paced, evolving needs of today’s business users. For many service organizations, this has resulted in solutions comprised of overly complicated and inefficient patchworks of siloed channels and applications with limited routing capabilities.

A Recipe for Diminishing Service Levels

Despite the rise of omnichannel customer engagement, most companies with legacy contact center platforms still only use queue-based routing with siloed channels that limits visibility, data, business users, service representatives, and customers. Customer interactions are assigned to queues that are focused on a single intention or channel, creating walls that hinder both customers and representatives. This creates the need to either establish a single queue to answer and report clusters of intention types or set up hundreds of different queues to answer and report each interaction type. With either approach, the complexity of channels and queues is overwhelming to manage. The inflexibility of queue-based routing also makes it difficult for business users to fine-tune business rules and maximize available resources. The result is diminished service levels, an inability to effectively handle call volume spikes, and inconsistent reporting and analytics. In other words, the spaghetti routing must be unraveled to support service levels and to drive data-driven business decisions.

The Secret Sauce for an Exceptional Customer Experience

Because routing is such a vital component of the customer experience, it’s essential to have the right technology in place. A more advanced approach is to have representatives log into a universal queue where work is routed to them based on competency framework, presence, SLAs, real-time metrics, and other business rules. With a universal queue, interactions can be continually prioritized to deliver to the best available representative in the moment of need. In a digital world, the representatives can handle multiple interactions at the same time. Thus, routing also needs to be able to deliver interactions based on each representative’s capacity for handling interactions.

To move beyond handling single interactions and deliver a true omnichannel customer experience, it requires taking a data and context-driven and rules-based approach to routing. Through orchestrated routing, customer interactions can be matched from any touchpoint over any channel with the most appropriate representative, removing the need to reconfigure routing scenarios into a static set of queues. Routing can then leverage valuable context, such as customer profile, interaction history, and journey context. It can also support pre-routing decision-making to guide users to self-service when appropriate and hold their place in the queue while they return to self-service. If they drop out again, it can also leverage their entire time in the contact center to dynamically drive prioritization and automated actions in the representative’s workspace. It can even prompt post-routing actions.

To support true omnichannel routing that combines orchestration and predictive matching, it starts with deploying the Genesys Customer Experience Platform that supports all channels and touchpoints.

Keep Your Customers Coming Back for More

By overcoming contact center routing spaghetti with a scalable contact center solution, you can delight customers while meeting current and future business needs. You’ll also have a recipe for serving up exceptional customer experience into the future. Learn more about how you can balance system stability and business agility while meeting growing customer expectations in our latest white paper How Omnichannel Routing Enables Seamless Customer Experience.