What is Call Center Ring Strategy and Why It Matters?

Looking for a call center ring strategy to implement in your business?

Customers always prefer businesses that can respond fast and solve their problems as soon as possible. Equally important, the response time and call center performance are directly proportional to the growth of the business.

For instance, when you call your Internet Service Provider (ISP), they give you different options. Like press one for technical support, two for sales and marketing, and three for a live agent, etc.

It makes the communication between the customers and business very fast. The customer will automatically be routed to the right agent who can solve their problem as soon as possible, making it a successful call center.

But this is not the case when the customer emails or messages the business. The response is usually late or no response at all.

So want to know about different routing strategies that help you respond to your customer’s call as soon as possible? Let’s dive right in!

What are Inbound Calls and How to Handle them?

Inbound calls are when customers want to reach your business or contact your business which call centers usually handle. It often includes technical support, sales, inquiries, complaints, billings, contract renewal, etc.

In Inbound call centers, when the call arrives, that call is routed to available agents or to an agent assigned to solve that specific problem. In addition, different companies use different call strategies to assist their customers.

The companies design call routing strategies in such a way that they can answer their customers quickly and route the calls to the right agent. Also, routing strategies utilize the agent’s availability, and the importance of good call strategies should not be underestimated at any cost.

Call Center Ring Strategies

Call Center Ring Strategies refers to the rules that resolve how inbound calls are assigned to the call agents. It is necessary to handle the call efficiently by reducing the wait times for the customers. To handle the incoming calls, some of the virtual call center ring strategies are as follows:

1. Ring All Strategy

Ring All strategy is very common, and almost every call center uses this strategy. In this, the call is connected to every agent, which means it rings the phone of every agent in the company.

The agent who picks up the phone first is only connected to the call and starts the conversation.

This strategy is very good as there is less chance of missing calls from the customers. Hence, it ensures that the customers don’t have to hold the line for a long time.

But this strategy has one drawback, if an agent has just completed the call with a customer or has already hit his daily target, they are not willing to answer the call.

So to overcome this problem, the experts have designed other different routing strategies.

2. Round Robin Strategy

Round Robin Strategy is a standard call ring strategy that fewer companies use, and they are mostly the new call centers.

In this strategy, the call is transferred to the agents according to the pre-decided order of agents. The call is first routed to the agent who is in the first position on the pre-decided order, and if the agent is not available, it is transferred to the second agent, and so on.

If the last agent fails to answer the call, the call gets routed again to the first agent. This way, the call gets routed sequentially in the preset order until one of the agents finally answers it.

This strategy sets priorities for the agents who should make the calls. Usually, the companies create the pre-decided order as the first one being the most experienced or hard-working and the last one being less experienced.

One of the drawbacks of this strategy is that it gives less chance to the other agents other than the experienced ones. Usually, the top agents solve the customer’s problems; hence, the less experienced agents will have less opportunity.

3. Memory Round Robin Strategy

Memory Round Robin Strategy is similar to the Round Robin strategy but with a little twist or difference.

It follows a pre-decided order, the same as the Round Robin strategy, but it keeps a record of where the last call ends or who was the last agent on the list who answered the call. Then, the routing resumes from the agent after that agent.

The main benefit of the Memory Round Robin strategy is that it allows every agent to answer the customer’s call and keeps all the agents utilized.

However one of the drawbacks of this strategy is that the best agent is less utilized. The agent on the top of the pre-decided order or the best agent has to wait for the last agent to answer to take the call once again.

4.    Longest Waiting Time Strategy

In this strategy, the call is routed to the agent who has waited the most time to take the call. In contrast, this strategy distributes the call volume equally among all the agents and makes all the agents active.

5.    Least Talk Time Strategy

In this strategy, the call is routed to the agent who has spent the least amount of time over the call. So, this strategy distributes the loads of the agents who have spent more time on the calls with the customer to the agents who have spent less time on the call.

6.    Fewest Answered Strategy

In this strategy, the call is routed to the agent who has answered a fewer number of calls. So, overall call distribution is judged over the total number of calls answered. So with this strategy, the agent cannot ignore the calls, as if the call is routed to the agent who answers fewer calls.

Understand Ring Group Strategies in Group Call

It is necessary to understand the ring group strategies for a business or a call center company. Ring group strategies help to route the inbound calls to the call agents. Here are the ways to call members of a group:

Simultaneous Ring

This strategy rings all the phone calls of all members in a group at once. The individual who picked up the phone gets the call; then while receiving another phone ring stops.

The call agents can determine how long a phone call will ring, if the phone calls go unanswered after a few seconds – it will report to the failover option in a group.

Cyclical Ring

This cycle ring strategy is similar to the Hunt ring strategy, with a few differences. When a call goes unanswered by the last team member after a certain time, the call will be returned to the first member and each member gets a ring again until the call is picked up.

Hunt Ring

This strategy rings the phone call in a group of team members one at a time in a sequential way. While setting a time duration for a ring, it decides how much time a call rings for a phone call before advancing to the next team agents.

When new agent calls enter, that member call will be hopped and will go to the next person in the call sequentially.

Which Call Center Ring Strategy Should You Choose?

Mentioned above strategies are some of the basic call center solutions that are used worldwide. From the look of things, you can know there are merits and demerits of each strategy.

In contrast, all these strategies are developed to reduce the average holding time and help customers solve their problems as soon as possible.

But there may also arise issues with the strategies like the mental strength of agents, the difficulty for call center managers to manage, who answers the calls, and many more.

One of the drawbacks of call center ring strategies is that sometimes the call can be routed to the wrong agent or department. So, in this case, the best thing to do is to apologize to the customer and transfer their calls to the correct agent or correct department.

Choosing the best call center software to implement ring strategy for your business

To get the best results, you need sophisticated call center software to handle the calls and ring and route them to the right agent. And that’s where KrispCall comes in handy.

KrispCall is one of the rising call center software with noteworthy ring strategy options. So you won’t have any problem routing your calls or distributing them among the bunch of agents. Even if you are receiving a high amount of call volume, you can handle them in a hassle-free manner.

Since KrispCall is a cloud telephony service with integrated call center software, you can handle calls virtually. So managing calls can be a lot easier.

And being a VoIP softphone, KrispCall offers you several additional benefits when compared to your regular VoIP hard phone or a desk phone. It comes aboard with a ton of useful cloud telephony features, which makes your calls and workforce management trouble-free.

In addition to its remarkable set of features, what sets KrispCall apart from the rest is its affordable pricing. And making things even more exciting is its free demo.

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Head of Content @ KrispCall (or, in plain English, I'm the guy responsible for ensuring that every blog post we publish is EPIC).