Follow-The-Sun Support – Isn’t Just About The Sun!

Follow-The-Sun support well deserves its highly accolated reputation. The system enables you to provide your customers with 24/7 support worldwide, previously a level of service only available to big corporation’s customers. You can read about what 24/7 FOLLOW-THE-SUN support is, why it’s important and the infrastructure challenges faced when providing it in our previous blog post about follow the sun support. This post below is aimed at explaining a somewhat less infrastructural but still crucially important challenge to think about when you are considering implementing FOLLOW-THE-SUN support.

To put it simply, FOLLOW-THE-SUN support is not just about following the sun and coordinating different time zones, that’s just your first challenge.

The more challenging aspect of offering this Follow-The-Sun higher class of service to customers has to do with available workdays around the world.

In contrast with most of the world where Saturday and Sunday are weekend days and people work Monday through Friday some countries have different work weeks.  For example, in the Middle East and Israel the working week runs from Sunday to Thursday, making Friday and Saturday the weekend. Add to the mix time zone differences and Asian countries like Malaysia, Bangladesh and Brunei that follow the Friday-Saturday weekend structure and you’ve got yourself quite a conundrum.

In addition to the differing work weeks there are public and national holidays to consider as well. Your service center staff in different countries will need to be given a variety of different days off. In the European Union alone there are 65 working days in which there is at least one overlapping national holiday between countries/regions. That means on average there is a place somewhere in the EU every week that has a four-day work week. Now go global and add in the rest of the world’s public holidays. Do you see where we’re going with this?

Finally, there are rosters, paid time off and sick leave schedules to navigate. These of course tend to vary according to different countries legislations and the unpredictability of when they will be utilized by staff. It is this unpredictability and variance that makes them a nightmare to manage when designing your follow-the-sun call routing.

Clearly, automation is key.

With some systems you can use Time Based Rules to accommodate standard working hours however when comes to managing non static and dynamic data such as public holidays which can change from year to year, rosters, paid time off and sick leave a static routing system is going to fall well short.   Natterbox’s answer to this challenge is Relationship Based Routing. We’ll give you a brief overview of how it solves the problem here and now, but to fully understand the myriad of other benefits Relationship Based Routing with Salesforce.com provides, see here.

Natterbox Relationship Based Routing can route calls based on any data variable in Salesforce.com. For example:

• Routing of customers calls based on data in any object or field in Salesforce. This data can dynamically change according to their status, revenue value, tenure as a customer, proximity or value of forecast opportunity value, support ticket data,  in fact any combination of data held in Salesforce or Service Cloud.
• Routing of customers to the best possible representative to handle their call. This could involve things like service representatives that are knowledgeable in the product or service they have purchased or can speak the same language as the caller. For example, if the incoming caller ID is +34 from Spain you might choose to preference route the caller to service agents who have Spanish language listed in their Salesforce or Service Cloud user profile, regardless of where those service agents are based.

All this routing occurs while the system continuously monitors the varying availability states of different service countries working hours, staff sick leave and more. Natterbox Relationship Based Routing is a complete solution to an otherwise complex situation. By automating this process, you are able to deliver fast, top quality customer service support 24/7, making you a global player.

Get started with Natterbox Cloud PBX and Service Cloud today.

To provide world-class customer support service standards, you need to be thinking about how to provide 24/7 follow-the-sun support. The team at Natterbox are expert in helping organizations ready to go global. We have the global infrastructure as a service and know how, so that you don’t have to and can get on with what you are good at. Our aim is to provide you with a high value low maintenance telephony system that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce and Service Cloud. Watch your business efficiency grow and your customers feel more connected and appreciated with our cloud based global PBX follow-the-sun support service. For information on how we can help you, give us a call today.