Imagine a technology that not only connects customers to a live agent, but connects them to the best agent available. That’s exactly what Intelemedia Communications’ technology can offer. 

Since 1993, Intelemedia Communications has provided outsourced contact center services and solutions for call center analytics, performance management, recording, reporting, scripting, and routing. Its newest offering, the Leaders Choice Program, is an intelligent routing system that identifies the best agents available in a particular queue and call center at a particular point in time and automatically routes calls to those agents. The technology tracks every call back to the specific call center and agent that handled it and identifies top performers based on predetermined criteria, such as sales conversions, service levels, customer satisfaction scores, average handling times, first call resolutions, or whatever other metrics the client wants to employ. 

The technology also enables Intelemedia to match specific call types and media types to each agent’s individual skill set, route calls to specific agents based on the caller’s propensity to buy a specific product, and identify repeat callers, and, through historic databases, predict if a specific caller is having difficulty resolving an issue. The system tracks the caller’s activity and determines if he should be routed to a specific agent based on that activity. 

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, notes that this is possible largely because “Intelemedia has executed some great partnerships that allow them to expand into new verticals and to augment analytics as well as A/B testing.”

Steve Trifelos, vice president of customer care call management at Intelemedia, says the program “is all about getting a higher percentage of calls to the best agents in the best call centers” within the company’s network.

Leaders Choice, Trifelos says, “shifts everything for the industry because of the impact clients will see on performance.”

Often in contact centers, performance and great customer service are at odds, but Trifelos says the Leaders Choice Program brings the two together.

Also as part of the Leaders Choice Program, each contact center in a company network sees what all of the others are doing in real time. According to Trifelos, this encourages competition that drives them to perform better. 

Intelemedia works closely with those call centers that aren’t performing well, creating improvement plans for individual agents or entire facilities. If after those efforts the facilities are still not performing well, they risk being cut from the network.

“It’s about giving our clients access to only the truly best contact centers,” Trifelos says.

In the year or so that Intelemedia has been actively promoting the Leaders Choice Program, it has picked up at least 12 big-name clients, and Trifelos says more are in the works. 

Among the customer signings so far are AIG, Time-Life, Dyson, Nautilus, Teeter Hang Ups, and Lunada -Biochemical. “Most customers using Intelemedia love the quality of the customer agents,” Wang says. Customers have reported increased sales ands conversion rates, better call handling, fewer abandoned calls, shorter calls, and quicker answer times. —Leonard Klie