Definition "Automatic Call Distribution"
Automatic Call Distribution (also ACD system) distributes the incoming calls from customers of a company via the telephone system to the individual employees in the customer service department. This can be an internal customer service department or an external service provider. If no employee is currently free, the caller ends up in the queue. For the distribution of calls, certain rules are set in Automatic Call Distribution, for example: the caller waiting longest in the queue is put through to the employee whose last call was the longest ago (longest idle). Modern software is able to define waiting times and rules for distribution. The skills, aptitudes, qualifications or assignments of the employees (skills) are also taken into account in automatic call distribution. For example, times, number of calls, duration of waiting times, duration of calls, duration of necessary follow-up, abandoned calls, transfer to co-workers, etc. are recorded in parallel. This data can be filtered and allocated according to various criteria, such as locations, groups, employees, projects or time periods, and is used for statistical evaluation of customer service performance.
If automatic call distribution is not used as a physical system on site, but as a web-based or cloud-based solution via the internet, it is called a virtual call centre. Advantage: The employees do not have to sit together at the same location in order to receive calls via Automatic Call Distribution, but they can be integrated into the call distribution, receive and process calls from any location. All employees at all locations access the same solution at the same time. In this way, one or more service providers can also be integrated uniformly into the call distribution. If you also use the web-based staff scheduling in addition to the ACD, the data from the ACD and the staff scheduling can be intelligently linked with each other, for example for billing purposes!
