What is Geographic Routing, and How Does it Work?
Australian businesses can improve customer service by ensuring customer calls go to the right department or staff member the first time with a cloud hosted PBX.
Geographic Call routing is a cloud phone network system feature that allows a company to route inbound calls based on the caller’s geographical location. This enhanced feature allows calls to be routed to specific branch locations, phone numbers, remote agents, departments, or ring groups. You can determine how the calls are routed based on your business’s unique structure and needs.
Geo routing is extremely helpful for both large and small businesses because whether you get 100 calls a day or 10,000, it ensures that callers don’t have to be bounced around from staff member to staff member, or department to department to get the right information or the right person.
Why is customer call efficiency important? Here are a few statistic to keep in mind:
- 69% of customers said they were on hold for too long when seeking help from a company.
- 26% of consumers have experienced being transferred from agent to agent without any resolution of their problem.
- Live assistance has the highest satisfaction rate, with 69% of customers saying that their questions are fully addressed over the phone.
Callers want to talk to real people who can help them without having to repeat the key call information to multiple agents or staff members. Understanding where calls are coming from can help determine how to manage inbound calls in the most efficient, customer friendly way possible. With a virtual phone system with a fully integrated geo-routing feature, your business can do more than meet these customer expectations, you can achieve next-level customer service.
Who should use geographic routing?
Geo routing is immensely convenient for businesses that receive a large amount of inbound calls. It streamlines the calling process and helps organize communication with callers from the start. It can save your staff time, and help improve the customer experience by minimizing the need for multiple call transfers.
It’s also helpful for businesses that are spread out across the country, and even the world. Once major benefit of a virtual pbx is that it works anywhere your staff has internet connection, making remote communication easier. However, this often means teams are more spread out. Geo-routing is a great way to centralize communication of your teams and ensure that even across geographical areas, your teams are there to answer customer calls.
No matter how large or small your business is, geographical routing ensures the customer call experience is seamless from the very start.
Why use geographical routing?
Geo routing through a cloud based phone system can help businesses better filter and serve their customers. You can use it to connect callers to your nearest business location or store to ensure they don’t need to repeat information to various locations.
You can also use it to ensure callers are getting routed to departments or call centers that are currently open and able to take inbound calls. If a caller from a certain time zone calls a branch of your business that is currently closed, but another one in a different time zone is open, you can route the call there. This helps ensure that all incoming calls are being attended to and minimizes the need for checking voicemails and making call backs.
Another key use for geographic routing is tailoring messages. Different areas may have different pricing, branding, terms and conditions and laws for your business, so it’s important that your staff and agents know where each phone call is coming from to be able to convey the right information.
2 types of geographic routing: Which is right for your business?
Through a virtual pbx you can geo divert a phone call in two ways: automatic geographic routing, and IVR geographic routing.
Automatic geographic routing is when the virtual PBX system identifies the location of the call by Mobile Location Information (Moli) from mobile towers and Caller Line Identification (CLI) for fixed line callers. It then uses that information to route the call to the appropriate department, staff member, ring group, or location determined by the call flow you set up in your virtual pbx system.
IVR geographic routing is when an IVR system determines the location of the caller through pre recorded prompts. It requires the caller to self-identify their information. This could include them inputting their postal code, selecting their state, or choosing the nearest business location to them.
With a fully integrated solution like Jet’s Cloud Based Phone System, geographic routing can be achieved for all calls, only selected call types, qualifying reasons, or certain locations. You have full control to identify the determining factors that route calls and where they end up.
To learn more about how Jet’s cloud business phone system can support your business call management needs with geographical routing, or to determine which type of geographical routing is right for your busienss, contact us today!