A few years ago, one of our customers spoke at our User Conference about a change they made to how they were routing calls within their contact center – and after they made that change, their customer satisfaction ratings greatly increased! What did they do that had such a huge impact?
The speaker said that instead of routing them through the normal First-In-First-Out (FIFO) methodology, they switched it up and started routing the calls through a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) methodology.
I remember sitting in the audience thinking, "Hold on. Did I just hear that correctly? Are you serious? You are really giving higher priority to the most recent caller versus those that have been waiting the longest?!" Needless to say, the speaker had my attention.
The speaker went on to explain that after measuring their customer satisfaction rates after changing their routing methodology over to LIFO, their numbers went up! Why? Here’s how the speaker summed it, as best as I can remember, in my own words:
"If you don’t know the truth, your perception is all you have to go on."
For the callers that called in last, they got answered first and they felt like they were getting right through. For those that called in first and had to wait, they only knew that they waited before they were helped and assumed that their wait time was normal – they knew no different. So, the overall perception was that while sometimes you would have to wait, other times you could get right in and get assisted.
When compared to the FIFO routing methodology, the perception was just the opposite – at all times you knew that when you called into the contact center you were gonig to have to wait.
See the difference?
I wonder, though, if there are any caveats to running this routing methodology in all contact centers. Is average talk time an issue? What about call volume? Seasonality spikes? Do any of these affect your ability to deploy LIFO routing?
What I’d like to hear back from you about is this:
- Have you ever used this routing methodology? And if so, what happened to your customer satisfaction ratings?
- I know that there is math behind this and I would love to know it. If you have the numbers to draw this out for us all showing how, mathematically, you can provide better customer service by using LIFO vs FIFO, I would love to see it!
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Tim Passios
Tim Passios
I began working for Interactive Intelligence in 1998 and have a more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications and software industries. I also worked in contact centers as an agent, supervisor, field trainer and manager for eight of those 20 years. In my current role at Interactive Intelligence I have constant interactions with customers, prospects, the media and industry analysts, which all help me to understand many different perspectives related to the contact center, unified communications and business process automation markets. When I’m not working I like to spend time with my family.
I have been getting several other comments regarding this posting from others on LinkedIn contact center groups:
1) In general. most who have commented said that they preferred LIFO over FIFO.
2) For those that were interested in LIFO, they were very curious as to how you handle abandons. The comment to me was, "Once customers know that they can get faster service by hanging up and calling in again, your abandons would go through the roof."
3) One person commented that they were concerned about not having any safeguards put into place that would prevent callers who were waiting on hold to never get answered because too many new calls came in behind them and got serviced faster.
4) Some stated that they felt that neither FIFO or LIFO should be used, but Bulls-eye Routing. This is a method by which you route callers to the best available agent based on skills needed, skills available, past customer purhcase history, past customer interaction history, or any other relevant information deemed appropriate in order to route the interaction.
These are some great comments! If anyone would like to share their experience in how they’ve been handling the issues above, I’d love to hear about them!
Tim Passios
FIFO leads would be best to dial them during high contact hours, preferbly night shift to make them most prodcutive and effective.
A possible solution would be set a limit where after a call waited for X minutes, they would then be the next to get answered. That way, you have a chunk of people being answered quickly and the people who are waiting will get answered without greatly impacting your abandoned calls. That could also help set customer expectations that "normaly I get answered quickly, but if I do have to wait, it is never more than X minutes".
Bulls-eye Routing is the concept of routing the caller to the best possible agent every time based on several factors (ranked by company preference, of course):
Realizing that in many cases, LIFO with set waiting limits is about as extensive as contact centers need to get with their routing, what are your thoughts on this type of routing for contact centers handing orders, insurance claims, financial transactions, etc.?
Pretty attractive approach for ACD with LIFO, I really like that idea.
In ACD, I see several theories.
1-Queuing Theory
Normalize/Prioritize waiting time per customer.
2-Scheduling Algorithms.
Optimum service per customer
3-Random early detection.
Drop calls that the system can’t assure QoS,while making customers save their time.
I think FIFO,LIFO,etc are part of above process.
Any ideas?