I have been requested to use my Aspect ACD to handle a european sales marketing campaign and have been drawn into a debate regarding the order of 'options' a caller hears when calling.

Currently I use two CCT's to route the call to the skill set that can best handle an inquiry. The first CCT accepts the call and filters out non sales inquiries to other departments. The caller if offered the usual "press 1 for....". Depending on their selection they are dropped into another CCT which specifically routes and queues that call depending on that agent groups working practices.

The order I have put the selections into in the past is to offer the General Sales Inquiries last on the announcement (this is what would handle the marketing calls) - this is to filter out the other calls such as service calls etc. so that my sales agents only deal with the profitable sales leads.

A colleague suggests that I place the sales selection first so that they are handled first. I believe that if we were to place the General Sales Inquiries first my sales agents would start receiving non sales related calls and may not be availalble to handle the sales leads.

What is the general opinion out there as to the order you would put options in for a sales team? Does the amount of calls outbalance speed of answer etc? I know it must be different depending on your business, but there must be a underlining understanding of whether people get lazy and hit the button when they hear word "general". Answers on a postcard to the usual address.....

I generally put them in order of most frequent use. If you have a high volume of non-sales related calls hitting your Sales line, then you would want to keep doing it the way you are. If this is a rare occurence, then I would suggest moving the sales prompt up front, but changing the verbiage to remove words like 'General' or 'Service' or 'Representative'. People seem to pick right up on those words and will choose that button since they believe it will get them to a live person first.

What are you doing with Rotary and 0-Pushers? These are generally the worst problem for me when it comes to properly filtering calls.

Regards,
Marianne

Unfortunatly there is an old sales number that was advertised on absolutly everything, even some invoices.....we still have to deal with hundreds of incoming calls daily form this line( sales, service, pizza orders etc)

0 pushers & technophobes are passed though to the General Enquiry line manned by a small but very knowlegable team. It's a nice safety net that the company likes, anyone not making a correct selection or taking too long to decide also pass through to this team.

I think I'll try reordering the announcements on one new sales line and see how it goes......

Cheers Marianne

I tend to try to go with the most popular option last, the reasons being that the customers will tend to go for the first option that even vaguely fits what they want.
However what the business desires and what the script actually say are equally important in determining where the callers end up. We tend to try lots of different way to get he callers to the right place, changing option orders and scripts to find the best result.