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As customer service quality becomes a true driver of differentiation, customer relationships often remain a source of dissatisfaction and high operational costs. Companies are therefore looking to reduce contact volumes while improving the overall customer experience. Automating non-priority interactions, combined with effective omnichannel orchestration, offers a relevant solution. This approach requires identifying the reasons for contact, contextualizing customer journeys, and delivering the most appropriate solution based on the intent, the channel, and the moment of interaction.
Whether it's a forgotten login, a refund follow-up, or tracking a delivery, low-value contact intents are frequent and often repetitive. These requests consume significant contact center resources, even though automated journeys, whether digital or voice-based, could handle them efficiently. When left unmanaged, they frequently result in frustrating customer calls marked by long wait times, complex IVR menus, and overloaded phone lines.
In contrast, high-value contact intents require direct interaction with an advisor. These include high-impact requests such as a subscription inquiry, or cases that cannot be resolved via digital channels like modifying a credit card spending limit.
Having a clear understanding of call intents is essential to effectively drive omnichannel orchestration. It is a key condition for improving service quality, controlling handling costs, and maximizing the conversion potential of high-value interactions.
But then, how can you accurately identify these intents and, more importantly, how can this insight be used to optimize inbound flow management across all channels?
-What are your main call intents?
-What volume do they represent?
-And which types of customers are behind them?
These are the first questions to ask when categorizing contact intents. But to what end? At DialOnce, we believe that understanding and prioritizing call intents is the key to designing optimized, seamless, and cost-effective contact journeys.
As Benoît Bouffard, Product Owner and co-founder of DialOnce, explains, this initial step is about assigning a value to each intent in order to prioritize them based on their level of added value, distinguishing requests that can be automated from those that require human interaction.
To do so, it’s essential to accurately identify contact intents. Here are the three main methods:
Through user behavior, such as the number dialed, choices made in the IVR, or digital navigation on the website.
Through customer identification, by matching the contract and associated product to pre-qualify likely needs.
Through contextual data, using factors like time, day, or seasonality to infer common or recurring intents.
This deep understanding of customer intents is a critical lever to enabling smart omnichannel orchestration, allowing companies to align resources with demand in real time.
Once the mapping of contact intents is complete, a second essential step follows:
personalizing customer journeys based on the data collected, explains Benoît Bouffard, co-founder and Product Owner at DialOnce.
Three levels of personalization can be implemented:
1. Personalization based on the customer journey context
The contact solution offered is adapted to the customer’s prior actions, such as the number dialed, navigation on the website, or IVR selections.
2. Personalization based on customer knowledge
The company uses existing data about the customer (e.g., age, location, preferred channel, contract type) to suggest the most relevant solution.
3. Personalization based on the company’s processing capacity
The journey adapts to internal operational context, for example, if the customer service team is unavailable, the system redirects to an alternative channel or a selfcare option.
This personalization strategy not only enhances the user experience, but also allows for better management of contact channels. High-value interactions are routed to the most effective conversion channels, while low-value requests are handled through automated journeys or digital selfcare solutions, improving both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
According to a study conducted by HubSpot on the future of customer relations, following an interaction with customer service, 19% of customers report being satisfied. This highlights the need to design efficient customer journeys that guide users to the most appropriate solution, based on both the customer's context and the company’s capacity at the time of contact.
DTMF IVR, natural language processing, voicebots, chatbots, FAQs...these are just a few of the tools that enable automation. However, their value lies in how intelligently they are integrated into contact journeys, and in the ability to track their performance within an omnichannel orchestration strategy.
Meanwhile, high-value interactions are handled by human advisors who, being less overloaded, can provide more effective and personalized support.
This strategy delivers several key benefits:
-Optimized human-digital integration through seamless omnichannel orchestration, allowing for better management of contact flows, improved First Interaction Resolution, and increased customer loyalty by delivering fast, simple answers.
-Reduced handling costs by automating low-value requests and streamlining inbound contact management.
-Shorter average resolution times thanks to better allocation of resources and intent-based routing.
By prioritizing call intents, companies gain greater control over operational costs, service quality, and overall customer satisfaction.
