Will the routing of contacts in future be done only by CRM?
Along with the current trend of universal queuing and multichannel contact routing, CRM applications are also becoming capable of queuing and routing of contacts to the right, suitable and available agent.
We can categorize the routing in broadly 2 categories:
1) Manual (rarely used) or automatic routing (widely used)
2) Skill based (rarely used) and rule based routing (widely used)
If we focus on automatic and rule based routing, it actually works depending on where we are defining the rules i.e. in the contact center (CC) application or the CRM application. Most of the time we see the rules are defined in the CRM application because they play a significant part in deciding on the routing capability, making routing functionality in the contact center application redundant.
Normally, the routing operation is done in two stages. First, the Contact center application sends a request to CRM, to decide which agent to route a contact, as the rules are defined in the CRM system. In the second stage, based on the response from CRM, CC routes the contact to the respective available agent. However in current market scenario, almost all the major CRM applications have the intelligent routing capabilities in built, makes the routing to be done in one single step instead of 2 steps in very efficient way. Examples of having routing capability in CRM applications include Universal Queuing & Assignment manager in Siebel, Universal routing and queuing in SAP CRM, routing configuration in SalesForce.com, etc.
Does this mean an end to the era of having routing capability in CC applications?
Providing the routing capability in CRM helps customers to avoid, heavy investment in implementation, support and maintenance of CC routing applications and makes the routing faster than traditional routing methods. Currently in CRM, apart from setting the rules of routing you can also queue the contacts, group the agent by skill, you can blend the contacts, do the contact handling based on contact priority, rules, time zone , etc.. Considering the routing is done through CRM, any integration of CC with Work force management (WFM ) application is also no longer needed as the same can be handled within CRM.
Another constituent which plays a major role in routing decision is, output/data from IVR. As nowadays IVR is also capable of integrating with CRM applications through web services, routing from CRM makes it easier and a viable option as all ingredients required for having routing capability are there within reach of CRM applications.
All this makes me think that the heart of CC applications i.e. routing engine is just redundant functionality. All the functionality & capability provided by CC applications around routing will no longer be needed and become quickly obsolete in CRM - CC market. What do you think?
Comments
Yes i think it would be done by CRM, as it would maintain our old customer contacts and also it would make the company work on future leads.
Posted by: Yogin Vora | September 7, 2009 02:31 PM