What is Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and How Does it Help Customer Experience?

What is an ACD?

ACD, or automatic call distribution, is a technology built into a phone system that automatically directs incoming calls to agents efficiently and quickly. The purpose of ACD systems is to help call centers manage call volumes and employ effective call distribution methods to avoid overwhelming the contact center and resolve customer calls as quickly as possible. 

Automatic call distribution software is necessary for all call center software and allows contact centers to route phone calls to appropriate agents efficiently and effectively. An automatic call distributor streamlines both the customer experience and the agent experience.

How Does an Automatic Call Distribution System Benefit Customer Experience?

An automatic call distributor system improves customer experiences in several ways. Benefits of ACD on contact center performance include: 

  1. Better Customer Resolution Rates
    Callers can reach contact center agents more quickly. Whether they want to be routed to specific agents or the first agent available, customers can resolve their issues faster by being routed to the right agent more quickly. This means faster customer resolution times. 

  2. Advanced Routing Based on Customer Information
    Advanced routing of calls can be done based on information within customer data like VIP status or other key indicators. With this information integrated into the phone system, important or VIP callers can call the appropriate agent qualified to handle their case. 

  3. Lower Queue Times 
    ACD can lower waiting time for callers by streamlining how calls are distributed. Customer support can be delivered faster by transferring incoming calls to suitable agents. Lower wait times in your call center and improve efficiency. 

  4. Increased Agent Productivity 
    With powerful call distribution systems, agent productivity can be increased as inbound calls are sent more quickly to the right resource. Improve agent performance and increase talk time in the contact center. 

  5. Optimized Efficiency
    Optimize the efficiency of your contact center by sending inbound calls to the right place efficiently, leading to higher customer satisfaction. The call distribution system utilizes automation to send calls to the right agents. 

What is the Difference Between ACD and IVR?

The difference between IVR and ACD is that ACD routing involves utilizing a routing strategy that considers various factors, such as customer data, to route inbound calls. At the same time, an IVR is an automated menu that leads callers through IVR menu options and allows callers to pick options for directions to the right resource. An IVR, or interactive voice response, gives customers choices, while automatic call distribution ACD focuses mainly on routing calls. 

This is not to say that an ACD and interactive voice response IVR can’t complement each other. Like peanut butter and jelly, an ACD and IVR are a perfect duo to have in your call center. An IVR can give menu options for the customer to navigate, improving personalization and efficiency. Once they finish the menu, the IVR can hand off the caller to an ACD system, which can further refine the routing through algorithms that consider agent availability and customer information. 

Utilize both IVRs and ACD systems to deliver the best possible customer experience.

How Does an ACD Work in a Call Center Phone System?

ACD automatic call distributors work like tour guides through your call center’s customer journey delivery. ACDs are personal tour guides that know what your customers want to see on their journey and will send them to the right place. Here are the steps that ACDs take to route customers to the right resource most efficiently. 

Incoming Call Identification

The system first identifies callers. The ACD system utilizes caller information. This information includes caller IDs, identification numbers, or identification services. Additional information can be obtained by pairing an IVR and ACD together. 

Intelligent IVR

Aside from efficient ACD solutions and ACD software, Bright Pattern’s call center software also has a powerful IVR system. Incoming phone calls can go through an IVR menu. By sending incoming phone calls through a phone menu options system, callers can reach the right agents, whether they need the helpdesk, the technical support department, or the customer service representatives. Power an efficient inbound call center using Bright Pattern’s call center software solutions with a combination of powerful automatic call distribution system, or ACD system, and IVR systems. Handle a high volume of calls, handle a high workload, and boost the customer’s experience with Bright Pattern’s IVR capabilities and ACD.

Omnichannel Platform

Bright Pattern’s call center software supports omnichannel capabilities, allowing callers to connect on any communication channels in your call center for a great customer experience. With omnichannel routing, customers and callers can connect with agents on any channel and be routed to any other channel, while the agent has the full context of the conversation at their fingertips. Make the customer journey a personal customer experience. Caller ID systems and CRM integrations with Bright Pattern’s call center software can further support a customized, omnichannel customer experience with your call center.

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Unified Agent Desktop

Our omnichannel contact center solution gives your organization the ability to seamlessly communicate with clients throughout their entire customer journey.

Omnichannel Quality Management

Ensure consistently excellent customer experiences and optimize call center performance with AI-powered OmniQM.

CRM Integration

Track the customer journey with your business on any channel. Integrations with all CRM providers or your own system of records.

Bright Pattern’s Key Features

Self-Service

Run a call center that can operate at any time of day. Allow customers to self-service from a system’s menu and boost the customer’s experience.

CRM Integrations

Bright Pattern’s CRM integrations deliver caller information to your agent’s fingertips. Get automatic number identification and caller ID, and resolve customer service issues quickly.

AI-Powered

Bright Pattern’s contact center solution integrates with artificial intelligence, powered by best-of-breed artificial intelligence from companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

High Reliability

Cloud call center solution means high reliability and uptime. Experience no downtime. Bright Pattern’s 24/7 support ensures call center systems never go down. Resolve caller’s issues with no downtime.

Built-In Quality Management

Implement QA on any customer interaction with automation for performance management. Track agent performance through KPIs and metrics, boost efficiency of your agents, and deliver comprehensive data and detailed analyses to supervisors through dashboards.

Workflow Management

Manage the flow of inbound calls, outbound calls, and interactions with intelligent call routing and queue management. From large organizations to small businesses, perform seamless integration of workforce management and agent management software within the platform for better customer service and efficient workflows.

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Bright Pattern’s Advanced ACD System and Features

Bright Pattern’s ACD utilizes powerful algorithms and a robust routing strategy to help businesses. Divide calls fairly among the call center agents. With Bright Pattern’s ACD and analytics, handle workload more efficiently and ensure that customer’s are being directed to the right resource.

Future-Proof

Cloud contact center software allows your cloud call center to support customer interactions on new channels. Support new features as well as standard features on a cloud contact center with a robust call center solution.

AI Integrations

Utilize powerful AI for basic functions like intelligent routing, predictive dialers, automated outgoing calls, and CRMs. Streamline workflow by routing incoming calls to the right agent, utilizing smart dialers, and automated screen pop with customer info.

Scalability

Omnichannel and cloud-based means high scalability compared to a premise solution. With just an internet connection, get access to the best call center software on the market. Bright Pattern is a scalable solution for any total number of calls.

Powerful Integrations

Microsoft
Zoho
Salesforce
Zendesk
Pipkins
NICE
Aspect
Oracle
Monet

Additional Bright Pattern Features

Why Clients Love Bright Pattern

“The ease of implementation for chat has enabled us to quickly build and turn chat on for our customer facing sites in less than a day.”

Derek G.

Director of Contact Center Operations

“It is an extremely robust, while easy to use software. It can handle massive telephony centers with ease while maintaining competitive telco charges.”

KC R.

BPO Technology Lead

“Great product and a great team. The product has worked as designed and has been very reliable. The call quality has also been excellent. The scenario tool is very powerful. It is also well integrated into Zendesk.”

Sean Rivers

Director of Operations Technology

“We have switched over from Interactive Intelligence 3 years ago and have been really happy so far. We had 100% up-time and enjoy the cooperation with their software developers and management team.”

Othmar B.

VP Marketing

“I answer all my calls from clients on retail with softphone and I can work at home effectively too. It is a way for me to judge my productivity and see how many emails I am answering with the dashboard that is displayed. ”

Julie T.

Retail Support Representative

“The system was very easy to setup along with training and onboarding from the Bright Pattern team. We use Bright pattern for inbound transactions, such as incoming calls, emails and chat. The reporting tools are easy to use and propvide the SLA data required for our partners.”

Sal Y.

Head of Customer Support

Frequently Asked Questions

Bright Pattern’s cloud call center solution utilizes the power of our cloud, cloud technology, and omnichannel interactions to power your customer experience and provide exceptional customer experiences. All call center technology and office technology needed to build strong customer relationships and a seamless customer experience are accessible through cloud call center software on a single interface. This means a cloud call center solution can allow your outbound call center or inbound call center to handle incoming calls and outbound calls, while being able to use other channels of communication, with more cost-effectiveness compared to legacy systems. Even though Bright Pattern is a cloud contact center software, Bright Pattern can integrate with your business phone system to support your customer support team. Utilize computer telephony integration, or CTI, to transform your CX into a cloud call center. Bring in your own phone provider and utilize CTI integrations so that the phone support is the same, but the technology is better. Make the overall cloud contact center experience better for call center reps, callers, and supervisors.

A cloud call center solution and cloud contact center software can give your contact center access to powerful technology. This includes powerful IVRs, autodialer, predictive dialing capabilities, and communications on all channels like voice, SMS, social media, web chat, MMS, chatbot, voicemail, text, smart phones, and mobile applications. Power a full customer experience with customizable features through just a browser.

Bright Pattern’s cloud call center technology can support seamless outbound dialing for outbound campaigns. Support outbound campaigns and dail through a list of phone numbers quickly with Bright Pattern’s dialing options, dialer capabilities, and outbound dialing infrastructure.

Utilize different dialing options in Bright Pattern’s platform, like auto dialers, automatic dialer, power dialer, progressive dialers, preview dialer, and more to go through a list of phone numbers quickly and power outbound customer communications. Skip disconnected phone numbers and leave voicemail on unanswered calls, meaning there is less time wasted for agents. Through Bright Pattern’s channel support, allow customers to connect back on any channel.

Allow agents to seamlessly go through a list of phone numbers as part of an outbound campaign and power an efficient, yet effective outbound call center. Bright Pattern is the right call center software for call center tools and call center solutions to power outbound dialing.

Bright Pattern’s call center solution integrates with any CRM solution. Allow your virtual call center to perform lead management with ease, putting customer information right at your agent’s fingertips on the cloud platforms. Whether they’re on a laptop or on a desktop with a headset, call center agents in your cloud call center can utilize integrated CRM solutions within the virtual call center software for better customer experience and workforce optimization.

On Bright Pattern’s cloud call center solution, data centers are utilized to securely store data, meaning strong and effective disaster recovery and data protection for a secure overall cloud contct center. Bright Pattern’s cloud contact center platform and software solution let’s your call center agents and sales team in your virtual call center effortlessly lead customers and callers through the CX journey.

OmniQM is Bright Pattern’s quality assurance system. Utilizing AI, OmniQM allows for detailed analyses and analytics of every interaction, ensuring remarkable customer experiences with every interaction. OmniQM makes agent management easy, allowing your call center to ensure that a qualified agent is delivering a good customer experience, employee productivity is high, customer connection is being made, best practices are being followed, and every service moment is impactful.

With Bright Pattern’s real-time dashboards, get supervisors insight into the agent experience and the performance of various teams, like your remote workforce, remote team, sales team, support team, and others. Ensure that idle time is low, average call duration is reasonable, call volume is being handled, hold time is low, agent uptime is high, and the efficiency of your agents is high. With real-time dashboards and monitoring, your supervisors can even intervene at the right time when an interaction is rated as low, allowing them to make quick decisions at the right time on the spot. Previous interactions and scripts with the caller are saved for agent training and can be utilized to create agent scorecards.

Gain the competitive advantage with the best call center platform, be empowered to make quick decisions during inbound customer service, ensure a smooth agent experience, utilize workforce management tools, and find new opportunities to build strong customer relationships in today’s digital world.

Bright Pattern’s sophisticated IVR, or interactive voice response system, can be customized with specific workflows to match any use cases and queries that are requested of it. With legacy contact center technology, self-service can be slow and troublesome. The pain of your system can be felt by customers, leading to a negative customer experience for the caller.

With Bright Pattern’s customizable call center systems and IVR, callers can be led through effortless self-service, powered by natural language processing, AI, and machine learning. Utilize technology like AI and machine learning to route calls and customers with queries through an effortless virtual call center with an auto-attendant. Bright Pattern’s IVR business systems and call center systems can also perform call routing with the auto-attendant when the caller wants to speak with a live agent.

Bright Pattern’s phone support system and IVR system also has advanced call distribution (ACD), allowing for a fair distribution of calls to the next available agent or specific agents. With smart call routing, intelligent IVR, an advanced IVR system, and a user-friendly interface for the agents, Bright Pattern provides the best call center tools and best call center solutions to boost customer engagement and transform your inbound contact center.

Leverage a combination of AI, machine learning, call routing with the phone system, and a powerful cloud contact center platform to beat the competitors in self-service and route calls with ease. Get live prospects through the CX journey faster, reduce hold time, and leverage virtual call center software for an effortless customer experience with an auto-attendant.

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