Automatic Call Distribution: Sending Calls on the Best Conversion Path

Not all inbound phone calls are created equal. Some are purchase-ready, some need nurturing, and some are irrelevant or even fraudulent – and each of these calls needs to be routed to a matching sales or customer support representative or, if the call is low-quality, blocked or rejected.

That’s exactly what an ACD system does – it distributes calls based on factors like agent availability and skills, caller’s location, call priority, data collected by an IVR system, queue length, and many more parameters, depending on the configuration of the system.

For anyone buying, selling, or managing a large volume of calls, an advanced ACD system isn’t even optional – it’s one of the core pillars of your call centre architecture, enabling you to handle hundreds and thousands of calls daily without sacrificing the quality of CX. In other words, the right ACD system helps you get the most out of the calls you generate or buy.

“There was a study by Forester on phone calls, and they found that calls convert 30% faster than web leads, and callers spend 28% more, with a 28% higher retention rate. So that’s pretty much an exponential growth number. If you’re going to go and spend a million dollars on PPC or media buying or whatever, it’s evident that you’re better off spending that money to generate calls than web leads.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence webinar

Here’s the good news: Whether you’re an affiliate, advertiser, affiliate network, or performance marketer that monetises phone calls, Phonexa provides you with a cutting-edge ACD system that integrates with our IVR and the Call Logic product for phone calls, which is a comprehensive call tracking, distribution, and analytics ecosystem. You get it all under one roof and one dashboard.

But, as is often the case with any tech, the devil’s in the details.

To reap the full benefits of automatic call distribution, you need to understand it well and set up distribution rules that align with your business goals, audiences, campaign types, and available resources. And that requires some strategic-level analytics.

Without any further ado, let’s uncover all the ins & outs of automatic call distribution and how you can make your ACD system work so your every inbound call gets to where it belongs.

Book a demo with Phonexa experts to explore our ACD system and how it connects to our call and web lead tracking, routing, and analytics software suite.

How Affiliates, Advertisers & Affiliate Networks Can Benefit from an ACD System

An ACD system is a great asset for any large-scale performance marketer who buys, sells, or manages hundreds of thousands of business phone calls daily. It’s hardly possible and surely not cost-effective to handle high call volumes manually, so bigger companies usually employ an ACD system on top of IVR: the latter collects the data, the former uses it to ensure the best match for the call.

Read also: How To Make Your Lead Acquisition Data-Driven with Phonexa

Here’s how an ACD system can serve different types of performance marketers:

Affiliates	Using an ACD system allows affiliates and publishers to route calls to the best available buyer, usually a relevant, immediately available buyer offering the highest bid. Likewise, affiliates can pre-qualify calls to ensure they only submit those that match the buyer’s expectations, and they can block fraudulent calls.
Advertisers	For buyers, an ACD system allows sending callers to the best-fitting sales or customer support rep and also possibly resells mismatched calls. For example, you can route purchase-ready leads to your top-performing sales reps and also accept cheap, mismatched traffic that you can redistribute.
Affiliate Networks	Having full visibility into call management and sales process, affiliate networks can use an ACD system to optimise direct and competitive call distribution, making it a win-win for buyers and sellers in the network.

On top of the mentioned, the ACD system can be used to optimise workload, ensure even call distribution, train agents on specific call types, and achieve many other goals, depending on your call routing architecture. To make all this possible, though, you need an ACD system that supports complex call flows and can analyse customer data in depth and accurately.

Intelligent Call Routing with Phonexa’s ACD System: 5 Call Flows Supported

To ensure maximum flexibility for complex call flows, Phonexa’s ACD supports multiple call routing methods and logic-based flows, each of which can be used under specific business conditions, such as a competitive phone call market or direct call distribution to a predefined destination or endpoint. As a Phonexa client, you can set up a multi-layer call routing logic for your call generation, acquisition, or management campaigns, taking full advantage of your business conditions and capabilities.

Call Flow #1: Data Collected by an IVR System

As you already know, Phonexa’s ACD works in tandem with its IVR system capabilities: the latter collects caller data, and the former analyses it to route the caller based on predefined logic and routing rules, while also factoring in system configuration (the call flow and more granular settings).

Read also: Marketer’s Guide to the Best IVR Software

Depending on the IVR flow, you may be able to collect the caller’s demographic, psychographic, and, in B2B, firmographic data (as well as data already available in your lead management system or CRM) to pre-qualify the call. In this scenario, whether you’re routing calls to an external destination or connecting them with your internal sales team, the agent on the other end receives a pre-qualified caller who matches the defined routing criteria.

Moreover, Phonexa’s Call Logic supports real-time data transfers across inbound and outbound call flows, making relevant caller context available before a call is connected. This enables smarter call routing and allows human or AI Call Agents to handle calls more efficiently, with less need for repetitive qualification steps.

Read also: Phone Number Checker: How to Verify That You Get the Calls You Want

Call Flow #2: Data Is Pinged before the Call with the Caller’s Phone Number

In trustless call distribution, sharing the caller’s phone number with the buyer can significantly speed up call acquisition and potentially allow you to get a better price for the call. Knowing the caller’s phone number, the advertiser can instantly understand whether the call matches their location, which is especially valuable for companies providing on-site services.

For example, if you’re selling leads to solar installers or home service providers, sharing the lead’s phone number might be a smart strategy to maximise sales. But then again, you have to make sure the buyers on the other end are reliable, as there are theoretical risks of lead poaching (the advertiser could just use the provided number without paying for the lead).

The counterargument, though, is that lead poaching is quite rare in practice and may only succeed once before the bad actor is identified and excluded from the network. More often than not, sharing a caller’s phone number is a win-win marketing strategy that fosters trust between lead buyers and sellers.

Call Flow #3: Data Is Pinged before the Call without the Caller’s Phone Number

There are still cases, though, when you may not want to display the caller’s phone number prematurely, like when you’re selling to non-verified buyers or new buyers. If so, you can still provide essential caller details, excluding their phone number.

Read also: How to Get a Pay-Per-Call Number: Everything You Need to Know

This call flow is arguably the safest in competitive markets, as no one can contact the leads before they buy. No less importantly, it protects the caller’s privacy because only the company that purchased this caller can call them. The only disadvantage is that buyers have less information to evaluate the call, which increases risks and therefore reduces the offered price.

Call Flow #4: Call with Applications and no Bidding

Depending on the marketing strategy and risk tolerance, buyers may want to acquire leads directly from sellers rather than compete in the market. For this scenario, the “call with application and no bidding” flow is a perfect choice: you’re simply connecting phone calls to a matching buyer on the pre-agreed conditions. Everyone knows the call price and qualification parameters, making it the most predictable and reliable phone call distribution model.

Call Flow #5: Pinning Based on Agent Availability

It’s one thing when you’re selling phone numbers and another thing when you’re routing live calls. The latter must be distributed immediately; otherwise, you’ll likely lose them. If so, you might want to prioritise available agents, connecting the caller to the best-matching agent that can instantly accept the call, even if some better-matched agents are currently busy.

Book a demo to explore the immense benefits of using Phonexa’s ACD system as part of our comprehensive phone call and lead tracking, distribution, and analytics software suite.

Test & Refine Call Campaigns for Free, Instantly with Predictive Modelling Software

With Phonexa, not only can you use the collected data to auto-distribute calls, but you can also use it for testing. Our predictive modelling software allows you to simulate pay-per-call campaigns at scale by testing different audiences, timings, platforms, and ads.

You can run hundreds of simulations at no cost and very fast until the best-performing set of variables is found, and then you can double down on this winning campaign with much less risk. Or you can A/B test a few high-performing scenarios to further reduce risk, not to mention that simulations themselves are becoming more accurate as you accumulate more marketing data.

 

Your Best Enterprise-Grade Tracking & Distribution Software for Phone Calls & Leads

Whether you generate, route, or manage phone calls, you likely also manage web leads, and therefore can benefit immensely from a comprehensive tracking, routing, and analytics system that ensures seamless data flows and provides access to a centralized set of management and analytics tools. With two core solutions – Call Logic for phone calls and LMS Sync for leads – Phonexa can cover the core tracking, routing, and performance management aspects of your marketing operations without you having to switch between different tools and reports.

 

Here are the two core products at the heart of the Phonexa platform:

These additional modules further extend Phonexa’s core functionality:

Take a product tour to experience our enterprise-grade tracking and distribution software for calls and leads

Frequently Asked Questions

What is automatic call distribution?

Automatic call distribution is data-driven inbound call routing by an ACD system that connects callers based on available information, such as demographics, psychographics, firmographics, purchase history, purchase intent, perceived value, and more. An ACD system usually integrates with IVR, CRM, and lead management software to factor in all data collected about the caller across touchpoints, including forms, emails, website engagement, and other interactions.

How to use an ACD system to grow your business

To get the most out of your ACD system, you have to collect as much data on callers as possible and set up a call distribution architecture that reflects your campaign goals, technical capabilities, and possibly also the affiliate agreement or cooperation conditions if you sell calls to other businesses. With Phonexa, in addition to automatic call distribution, you can verify all inbound calls to make sure you’re only processing qualified calls that are likely to convert.

How much does the ACD software cost, and what else do you need to optimise call flows?

Buying an ACD system separately makes little sense, since you need to collect marketing data before you can automate call distribution. This is why at Phonexa, an ACD system is included in your subscription plan and coordinated with the other elements of our call and lead management ecosystem by default.

So whether you’re buying, selling, or managing inbound and outbound phone calls, you have all tracking, routing, and analytics software under one roof, all fully synced and supporting instant data exchange so you can track and improve the customer journey across channels and touchpoints.