Coming soon: Call centers that don't suck

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Just about every consumer who has dealt with a call center has faced the frustration of an unending sea of menu options or waiting eons to talk to the least helpful employee.

Those annoyances wear away at customer satisfaction, and that can cut into the company's bottom line.

But all is not lost.

A new service developed by IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) and specialty insurance provider Assurant Solutions (AIZ, Fortune 500) plays matchmaker between customers and call center reps. IBM's service, called the Real-time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), connects customers with the call center employee best qualified to serve their needs.

Currently, most call centers only match an agent's availability and product mix expertise with the customer's particular product.

"It's a little bit of a crap shoot regarding who you're going to talk to," said Toby Cook, analytics practice leader at IBM Global Business Services. "We combined our expertise in contact centers with our analytics to take it to another level. It's like speed dating for contact centers."

When a call comes in, RAMP instantly pulls up data about the customer, including past purchases and previous calls. The system then cross-analyzes that data with the skills of each call center agent.

For example, if a customer were to dial into a wireless company's call center, RAMP would be able to determine what phone the customer has, how much he uses it, what features he uses, and other identifying factors like the customer's age. The service would match up the customer with a representative who has had past success with others who fit that criteria.

Traditional call centers might treat all customers who own the same BlackBerry models the same, but that can fall short. One BlackBerry user might be a global business traveler, while another user might be on a family plan, for example.

IBM's technology daily measures call center reps' success with a number of factors, including the number of customers they convince to stay with the company. RAMP also determines long-term success: some customers may be convinced to stay with the company after speaking to a rep, but then call back later to cancel.

All of RAMP's analytics are done in a matter of seconds. And since the system matches the analytics with data about customers' acceptable wait-time thresholds, IBM says the time customers spend on hold has either stayed the same or, in some cases, improved.

Though RAMP only became commercially available in the past few weeks, it has been through about six years of testing.

In 2004, Assurant Solutions took note of its call center issues and developed the analytics-based routing technology that underpins RAMP.

Though IBM's version of the system is enhanced and portable, Assurant's more rudimentary system still had a drastic impact on the company's sales figures.

Assurant determined that matching customers with the best-suited call center agents for their needs not only improved customer satisfaction, but it also boosted the company's sales. After the first year of using its new technology, Assurant's revenue from its call center rose 29%, and sales through customer retention grew 37%.

The system improved Assurant's call-center attrition rate too. As the system matched up call center reps with situations they would succeed in, agent morale improved. Like at many call centers, Assurant's call center reps are paid on commission.

"The more customers they save and the more they sell, the more money they make," said Cameron Hurst, director of Assurant Solutions. "The system has a knack of delivering the right customer to the right rep, giving the reps the highest opportunity for success. They love it, and it has resonated very, very well with our customers."