Skills-based Routing

Customer satisfaction is paramount to the success of your call center. Using skills-based routing, your customers can quickly get to the right agent the first time. Using inContact® skills-based routing, customers can be dynamically placed into the most appropriate queue based on caller input and/or database lookups.

Get your customers to the right agent the first time:

• Minimize transfers
• Reduce overall talk-time
• Improve agent morale

Improve customer satisfaction:

• By enabling the customer to complete a transaction as quickly as possible
• By connecting them to a knowledgeable agent the first time

Minimize training:

• Agents need training only on their specific skills (unlike group-based queuing which often requires training on seldom-used campaigns)

How will inContact help me effectively implement a skills-based routing system?

The inContact Professional Services team is responsible for building initial call flows every time a new customer is turned up, and can be an ongoing resource as needed. This experienced team ensures your skills-based routing is implemented in a way that optimizes the productivity of your agents and the experience of your customers. Our skills-based routing technology has been proven at hundreds of contact centers and has routed millions of calls. 

Can some agents have preferential treatment for a given skill?

Sure. When agents are given a skill, they are also assigned a proficiency. This means that your best-trained and most capable agents can be configured to receive calls before other agents. In this scenario the newer, less-experienced agents can still receive calls, but only when the more seasoned agents aren’t available.

How do I determine my staffing needs with skills-based routing?

Overstaffing can be just as bad as understaffing, so having the right tool to do it properly is of paramount importance. The ideal approach is to use a solution that can track historical call trends as a basis for future call volume. Based on the forecasted call volume, the available agents with the necessary skills are identified and assigned to a work schedule.  The inContact call center workforce management product is designed to do this very task.  It takes a variety of inputs, including expected call volume per skill and available agents, and then runs a number of simulations to produce the ideal schedule. 

How does skills-based routing impact agent training?

Old-fashion “group-based routing” implies that any given agent can handle all calls routed into one (and only one) group. Groups tend to be either too small or too large to be highly productive. Skills-based routing solves this problem. Agents can be trained on as few or as many skills as needed. 

This means that a new hire can be taking calls for a single skill within a short amount of time, while continuing to train on other skills as time permits. As they learn a few core skills, then can gain others through inContact eLearning.

Can you also route email, chat, and fax according to agent skill?

Absolutely. Our ACD with skills-based routing can be configured to route the most common non-voice communication methods to the proper agent.