Providing customer service by following the sun, allows you to service customers in a continuous support model for 24 hours. Ideally, you have international teams in different locations and time zones that combined cover all 24 hours of the day. Incoming calls are routed to the active contact centers. This can be based on a time-of-day routing combined with for example a weighted, language-based or skill-based distribution of calls. With the right tools at hand (such as My Sound of Data portal), you can manage these routings yourself and adapt on the fly if necessary.
If your company has several contact centers around the world, you’ve probably come across Time of day-routing. This allows you to automatically forward incoming calls to active call centers based on the time of day defined in a calendar. If you have contact centers active in different time zones across the world, you could take this up a notch and implement Follow the sun-routing.
Teams in different time zones
Overlapping shifts
At some point during shifts, several locations are working alongside to answer calls. No matter what time and from which location a customer calls, there is always an active call center. Tickets that can’t be solved right away or that need further investigating can be picked up by another contact center. This reduces delays in replying. Provided of course that all contact centers use the same contact center CRM software.
Advantages
So what are the most important benefits that an effective Follow the sun-routing can provide:
- No need to plan (more expensive) nightshifts: 24/7 coverage can be achieved by teams in different time zones
- Vastly reduce delays in replying: when one location closes, another active location can pick up remaining open tickets
- Easier to handle (un)expected peaks: if one contact center unexpectedly receives more calls than they can handle, the overload can easily be routed to other active locations
- Calls can be routed to a location in a different time zone that is not affected in case of national holidays or outages
- Increased customer satisfaction because of 24/7 availability and quicker replies to issues that need further investigation
If you’d like to find out whether this type of routing can be implemented for your customer service numbers, get in touch. We’ll be happy to advise you.