Call routing
Was ist Call routing?
Dieser Eintrag liegt derzeit nur auf Englisch vor.
Call routing is the process of directing an incoming phone call to the right queue, agent, department, or destination based on a set of criteria — such as the caller's number, the menu option they pressed, the time of day, or the skills required to handle their request. Instead of every call landing on a single line or ring group, a routing engine evaluates each call against configured rules and sends it to the destination most likely to resolve it, which is what keeps wait times down and first-contact resolution up as call volume grows.
More detail
Routing criteria range from simple (time-of-day schedules, round-robin assignment) to attribute-based rules that match a call to an agent by skill, language, or region, and most platforms let several rule types combine — an IVR menu choice can narrow the queue, then a skills rule picks the specific agent inside it.
Call routing is the umbrella behaviour; an ACD (automatic call distributor) is the system that executes it in a contact center, pulling the next call off a queue and assigning it to a specific agent according to the configured routing strategy.
When no agent or queue qualifies — outside business hours, or every eligible agent busy with overflow disabled — a routing plan typically falls back to call forwarding to another destination, voicemail, or a callback offer rather than dropping the call.
Häufige Fragen
- Is call routing the same thing as an ACD?
- Not quite. Call routing is the general concept — directing a call to a destination based on criteria. An ACD is the specific contact-center system that performs routing at scale across queues and agents, applying a configured strategy to pick which available agent gets each call.
- What criteria can a call be routed on?
- Common criteria include the caller's phone number, the IVR menu option selected, business-hours schedules, agent skills or languages, customer attributes from a CRM lookup, and current queue depth — most routing engines let several of these combine into one rule chain.
- What happens when call routing finds no available destination?
- A well-configured routing plan defines a fallback: routing to a secondary overflow queue, offering the caller a virtual callback instead of holding, forwarding to another number, or dropping to voicemail — rather than leaving the caller on hold indefinitely or disconnecting.
See also
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