What is Predictive Behavioural Routing and How Can it Benefit CX?

Contact centres are yet to use intelligent routing to personalise customer interactions

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Predictive Behavioural Routing
Contact Centre

Published: April 6, 2021

Anwesha Roy - UC Today

Anwesha Roy

Despite CX personalisation being a priority at 93% of contact centres, a staggering 95% of them are yet to use intelligent routing to personalise customer interactions. Intelligent routing matches incoming calls with the perfect agent, who is best suited in terms of personality, skills, knowledge set, and availability to quickly and effectively address the caller’s query. It increases the chances of first-time-right, thereby improving the overall customer experience. One of the most sophisticated intelligent routing solutions you could deploy at your contact centre is predictive behavioural routing – talking personalisation to a whole new level.  

What is Predictive Behavioural Routing? 

Traditionally, automatic call distributors (ACDs) would match customers with agents based on simple parameters like whoever is available and the queue length. Intelligent routing improves upon this by predicting things like when an agent is most likely to get free from a call, what is a customer’s likely query based on their purchase lists, etc. You could classify intelligent routing in a number of ways, including skills-based routing, predictive routing, and now predictive behavioural routing.  

You can define predictive behavioural systems as an ACD capability that leverages artificial intelligence to analyse the customer profile of an incoming caller and predict their call requirements, matching the caller with the best-fit available (or soon to be available) agent based on personality and behavioural traits.  

How Does Predictive Behavioural Routing Work?  

This is informed by accurate profiling metrics on your agents. The contact centre database must document the traits of every agent with as much veracity as possible, including their typical disposition, average handling time, knowledge about a specific customer demographic, the experience of having handled a specific customer issue, and collaborative problem-solving patterns.  

Next, the ACD detects the identity of an incoming caller and analyses their profile, breaking it down into behavioural, emotional, and transactional variables. This allows the predictive behavioural routing engine to match the caller with available agent profiles, streamlining the interaction from the get-go.  

How does Predictive Behavioural Routing Benefit CX 

The biggest benefit of this capability is that it increases the chances of a customer connecting with an agent on a personal level, given that they are likely to have similar communication styles and personality profiles. The customer is more likely to continue doing business with an organisation that they feel shares values that are similar to theirs. The data collected during these interactions will only make the predictive behavioural routing engine better with time, enhancing performance. It also improves first-time-right, allowing agents to process more calls in a certain period of time – boosting contact centre productivity and reducing wait time for customers.  

Examples of Predictive Behavioural Routing Technology 

Mattersight is a pioneer in this technology in 2015, and Forrester estimates that it can unlock 312% ROI in just one year. It was acquired by contact centre leader, NICE, which launched its own predictive behavioural solution in 2020, leveraging real-time sentiment analysis to match callers with the right agent.  

 

Artificial IntelligenceAutomationCRMSentiment AnalysisUCaaS
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