Friday Feature: Router Geographic CLID

This post is part of our Friday Feature series where we look at a part of the NewVoiceMedia platform that you might not be familiar with but we think you might find useful!

When building your call plan it's essential to empathise with your callers and try and design a solution that provides them with the most efficient and personal experience with your team.

One of the aspects you might consider is the geographic location of your caller.

Scott Hawkins from our Professional Services team explains, "We offer a Geographic CLID applet, which is pre-built with every UK area code. We're able to help customers to build different routing patterns for callers that we recognise are coming from different areas of the country."

There are a couple of great use cases for routing in this way. "I've just implemented the solution for a client who has specific team members that look after specific regions of the country. Up until now there was a lot of transferring of calls once they had been answered to get them to the right person. Implementing the Geographic CLID has meant we can target the callers at the right person first time."

A second use case could be implemented by anyone that has recruited a team from all over the country. If you have employees in your contact centre that are originally from other regions, or if you have a network of home-based agents, then why not try and target them for callers from that region. Welsh callers get aimed at your Welsh agents. London callers get aimed at agents originally from London.

"It seems simple," says Scott "but even the littlest bit of relationship building between a caller and an agent can really help. Coming from the same region and perhaps knowing the same places can help to break down barriers and build a more long-lasting relationship."

One way that businesses have tried to achieve this in the past is by setting up multiple numbers for customers to call and listing them on their website. "But this just puts the job in the hands of your customer to make the decision on which number to call," says Scott. "We're trying to make it easier for customers, not harder."

When building out the Geographic routing Scott's first piece of advice is to remember that not every phone passes through the CLID, so you need to build out a call plan for these calls - perhaps they just drop into your normal call queue.

But for the majority of calls that do present a CLID then there are a range of choices to route on:

• City Name
• Prefix
• County
• Region

Depending on how you have set up your account ownership, or the dialects that you have within your contact centre you may only choose to create geographic routing for some of the country.

For each option that you do want to create a custom route for you get to determine the next building block in your call plan. This might be to drop into a specific queue for your Scottish customers for example. Scott suggests that, "If you are going to start creating custom queues for different regions then you might want to think about re-recording your in queue messages with a local accent as well - you don't want to over complicate things - but it's worth bearing in mind."

Ultimately, at the end of your regional queue you will have a specific group of agents who you wish to target these calls to. However, it is important to ensure you build in overflows to other groups if all of your Irish agents are on the phone for example. "It's more important that the phone gets answered quickly, than by someone with the right accent" adds Scott.

Have you considered treating calls from different geographic locations in a different way? Do you think that speaking to someone with a similar accent helps the customer experience?

Note: Geographic CLID routing is only available in the UK at this time.

If you would like more information on how NewVoiceMedia can help you deliver a more personalised experience to your customers just visit our ContactWorld page.