Introduction
As support organizations expand the offerings that they provide to customers, it can become difficult for representatives to devote the required time for maintaining a deep understanding of the areas that the organization supports. For this reason, many representatives tend to become more skilled in specific areas than others. This factor, combined with other factors such as representative turnover and the need to support customers across multiple regions, means that organizations need to ensure that customers will be connected to representatives who have the necessary skills to solve their issues.
The unified routing feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service includes a skill-based routing solution that helps organizations more effectively handle these support issues. Its configurable interface helps ensure that conversations are routed to representatives who have the skills and proficiency levels that match those levels that are defined on the incoming conversation.
Through skill-based routing, organizations can better tailor how they support their customers based on key factors, such as products, regions, certifications, and more. For example, your organization might offer product support to customers across Europe. As customers contact support, you’ll want to ensure that they're getting support on the most appropriate product and that they're routed to a representative who speaks their language. For example, a customer from Spain who contacts your organization about a Microsoft Teams issue should be sent to someone who has knowledge of Microsoft Teams and who speaks Spanish. By using skill-based routing, unified routing will identify which representatives have the needed skills and then distribute the work item to one of them.
Using skill-based routing has several advantages. Because organizations can use it with existing queues and routing capabilities, they’ll experience vast overall improvements, including:
Faster conversation resolution - Representatives are assigned cases faster and more efficiently by identifying which representatives are best qualified to address the issue.
Minimized queue overhead maintenance - Organizations can spend less time managing queue users and setting up routing rules because conversations will be routed based on representative skills.
Enhanced productivity - Because representatives are assigned cases based on their skills and ability, they can be more productive by working on items that they're more familiar with and skilled in.
CSAT and KPI management - By ensuring that the most qualified representatives are working on items, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores will increase.
Skill-based routing overview
The following sections review how routing and distribution are done with unified routing. The routing and work distribution process consists of two steps:
Routing - Conversations are distributed to the most appropriate queue based on routing rules that are set up for the organization.
Distribution of work - Conversations are allocated to representatives who are members of that queue in real time, based on a representative's available capacity and their current presence.
Unified routing and work distribution
The following image shows an example of unified routing and work distribution at a high level.
In the preceding example, the unified routing and work distribution process is as follows:
A customer named Frieda initiates a chat conversation. After identifying that Frieda is communicating through a chat channel, the system will identify the workstream as a product and billing live chat. Chat items in this workstream require a capacity of 50 units. Your organization assigns each representative a capacity of 100 by default, and this number will decrease when items are assigned to them. This approach implies that the system will only consider representatives with an available capacity of 50 or more. When this conversation is assigned to a representative, the system will block (remove) 50 units of the representative's capacity.
The routing and work distribution logic will start. Context variables help store contextual information that the routing engine can apply. With these context variables, the workstream's routing rules will identify that this conversation is related to billing and will send the conversation to the billing queue.
After the conversation has reached the billing queue, the system will allocate the conversation to a representative who’s a member of the billing queue and who satisfies the following criteria:
A capacity of 50 units or more
The current presence status is Available
Of the members who are assigned to the billing queue, only Bert has the required capacity and presence. As a result, the system will assign the conversation to Bert. When Bert starts working on the conversation, the system will change Bert's presence status to Busy, reduce Bert’s remaining capacity of 80 units to 50 units, and then update it to 30 units.
Where skill-based routing fits in
With skill-based routing, items are still routed to a queue before they’re distributed to the appropriate representative. The primary difference is that each conversation will have skills attached to it. When the system tries to identify a representative to send the item to, it will look for a representative whose skills match the skills that are defined on the work item.
The following diagram shows an example of the skill-based routing process.
As shown in the preceding diagram, the skill-based routing process is as follows:
When a customer initiates a conversation, the system will attach skills to the conversation based on work classification rules that have been defined in the application.
For example, a customer from Spain has an Xbox 360 and needs to obtain support. When that customer signs in to a customer portal and initiates a chat, you can present them with a pre-chat survey question that prompts them to choose Xbox 360 as a device from a list. If you’ve enabled location information, the customer's geolocation of Spain will be captured. By using skill attachment rules, the system will attach the Xbox 360 product and Spanish language as the skills to the conversation.
Based on the routing rules that are defined for the workstream, the system will route the conversation to the appropriate queue.
After the item has been added to the appropriate queue, the work distribution system will begin matching the representatives' skills with those skills that are attached to the conversation. After finding a match according to the exact or closest skill match, the work distribution engine will assign the conversation to the representative.
Deploy skill-based routing
To deploy skill-based routing, organizations need to define the necessary skills and the different levels of skill proficiency that their representatives are required to have to work on issues.
At a high level, the steps for deploying skill-based routing are:
Create rating model(s).
Create skill types and skills.
Assign skills to representatives.
Set the default skill-matching algorithm for a workstream.
Specify the skill classification method to be used.
Specify the assignment method that will be used.
Enable skill control for representatives.
The remaining units in this module will examine each step in more detail.