Quick Overview

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Everyone has their share of frustrating customer support stories.

However, to prevent your members from experiencing the same, it is crucial to resolve their concerns quickly and efficiently. One way to achieve this is by using skills-based routing (SBR). Unlike traditional Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) systems that simply choose the next available agent, SBR assigns the most suitable agent based on their skills.

Let’s delve into skills-based routing and how it can enhance your contact center.

What is Skill-Based Routing (SBR)?

Your members have different needs, and your agents have different skill sets and abilities.

For example, a Spanish-speaking member calling to inquire about loans requires an agent who knows both your loan program and the Spanish language. Identifying the agents with those specific skills and automatically distributing the conversation to one of them is called skill-based routing.

Sounds easy?

It is not.

A modern credit union or community bank has multiple communication channels set up—chat, text, voice, video, in-branch meetings, and even AI agents—along with a variety of departments and personnel types. This complicates routing, making connecting members with the most appropriate agent difficult. Hence, SBR uses several components, such as queues and routing profiles, that help you tailor your routing based on your specific needs.

These components are described below in detail. 

SBR matches agent skills to member needs using ‘Queues’

Queues correspond to an agent’s skill or a category of interactions they should handle.

For instance, Queues let you assign whether an agent performs notarizations or specializes in a type of loan, whether an agent can handle English or Spanish appointments, or assign hours of operation profiles. So, when a member starts a chat, they select a queue and are directed to an agent who can handle that queue. Queues are assigned to departments, and agents in the department can generally handle contacts through the queues assigned to their department.

SBR matches agents to member needs & channels via ‘Routing Profiles’

Routing profiles are groups of queues assembled based on the types of queues an agent or a certain group of agents can handle.

Each agent can only be assigned one routing profile, which distributes multiple types of interactions across multiple channels. For example, you could create a routing profile specifically for video agents with the necessary hardware to handle video calls. In this profile, you would add queues designed for video calls and select the video channel for each queue. Another example could be a routing profile for agents adept at handling multiple text-based interactions simultaneously, allowing them to manage text and chat interactions from all queues.

What’s the point of having both queues and routing profiles? 

Queues generally align well with departments. For instance, a loans department can have separate queues for home loans, auto loans, student loans, etc. 

Now, some agents in the loans department might be better suited to specific channel types. For example, providing high-quality video calls requires an above-average setup, which may not be necessary for every agent. Routing profiles combine both of these aspects. They help you customize your routing and your agents’ workload by queues and media types.

SBR prioritizes high-value conversations using ‘Queue Priority’ 

Some contact requests are more important or time-sensitive than others.

For instance, you might want to prioritize high-value member interactions over other callers or prioritize a real-time video call over texts that can be handled asynchronously.

Queue priority settings allow you to tell the Eltropy SBR engine which interactions are more important. This setting indicates whether contacts coming through a particular channel and queue are more or less important. When two conversation requests enter the system simultaneously, the higher priority queue will be selected if an agent can handle both.

For example, you could have a routing profile for text and chat agents who are speedy typists capable of handling multiple conversations simultaneously. You could prioritize an emergency or billing queue over general inquiries within this profile.

SBR prioritizes high-value conversations using ‘Agent Proficiency.’

Every agent has different experience and expertise levels, making some more proficient at specific tasks requiring particular skills.

For instance, a seasoned loan officer would be more adept at handling loans than a junior loan officer. The Eltropy SBR system incorporates agent proficiency scores in queues. In a routing profile, you can determine each agent’s proficiency for each channel of each assigned queue.

You must enable proficiency scores in your conversation settings. Routing profiles also have a proficiency setting, which can cascade proficiency scores to all agents with that profile. You can override these scores directly in the user’s settings, where the overridden score will persist even if the routing profile proficiency score changes. The proficiency scale ranges from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest proficiency and 1 the lowest.

By utilizing skills-based routing, you ensure that your members’ concerns are addressed promptly and efficiently, enhancing their overall experience with your contact center.