What is Skills-Based Routing and How/Why Do Call Centers Use It?

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and NICE studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. Hi guys. Hey, I want to give a real quick 30,000 foot view on skills based routing. I've had a couple of questions I've come in through the, with the podcast, with the SMS, the call center, the texting community. So just real quick overview, new call center managers have a lot of questions on this, right? They're moving from an office phone system to that piece of call center software and skills based routing really comes into play.

00:51So a couple of things I want to explain before we have to understand what a skill is or a cue. And basically, that's just a bucket of calls. Normally, 1-800 number comes into your IVR, press 1 for password resets, press 2 for account information, press 3 for sales. And now you have 3 buckets. So those are all different skills or cues that reps can be logged into. Reps can be available to take calls in. We can also give a priority to these. So we can have one rep that could be in sales and password resets but they're really good at sales and they're just there as emergency for password resets. So we can give them a one as a priority for sales and a two or three or four, whatever that number is for our password resets. So just keep that in the back of your mind as we go through this example. But here, let me see if this can help you, if I can help explain a little bit. I'm a horrible drawer. So bear with me on my examples here. It'll be a lot of circles in squares, not a lot of art, right? But let's just say we're three kind of customers. We have a tier one, we have a tier two, and we have a sales, right? And this is like, tier one is like, you know, password resets. Tier two is, is say we have account questions, and three is sales maybe from the website. Okay, so these three customers, someone with a kind of of an easy question, some with a little bit more advanced question and then a sales question, right? So how do we make sure that the proper rep is getting these calls and who should get these calls? Well, how this is going to work is everybody's got to draw a cloud now, right? That's my my org, right? And there's about 800 number. And let's say we have 1-1-800 number for this. Now some organizations set this up where, you know, maybe tier 1 has its own 1-800 number, tier 2 does. Sales definitely has its own 1-800 number. And then they can go into here and that's how we route instead of the IDR, the skill is based on the 800 number. But most companies just comes into an IDR, right?

02:59So these three calls are coming in. And it's press one for password reset, right? Press two for account information, press three for sales, right? So now we know what these customers are calling about. So what we do next is we take our reps. And our reps are Janie, Susie, and Bill. And let's say Janie is a great salesperson, right? So she's in the sales skill and she does a priority as a one. Let's say she's a really senior rep as well so she can take our tier two questions pretty easily. We like her in sales though, right? So we'd like to prioritize her in sales cause she sells really well, but she can answer these account questions. She's a priority two for that. And then she's kind of an emergency tier one in case we're in queue, right? She'll take calls. So she's a priority three.

04:00Now Susie's our trainer, right? She's a, she's almost a supervisor. She's a team lead for our account support division, right? So with Susie, she's going to take our tier two calls and she's going to be a one in those. Right? She's more technical support than sales. So our tier ones, she's going to be a two. And again, from a emergency sales, if we have a queue in sales and nobody's there, and she's available, right? She's going to take a call. She's not great at it, but she can do it, right? Cause she's been here long. So she's a three for a priority. Right? Now, Bill, let's say Bill's a new rep. Bill's just come out on the floor a couple of weeks And he's only done account questions, right? So he can do password resets. He's really good at that, right? Those kind of easy questions.

04:46That's what we do in training first. So as a tier one, he's a one, and he's really starting to get better at the account questions, right? So as a tier two, right, he's a two. He's not even in sales yet, right? We haven't really gone over, we haven't trained him in that. So we're not even gonna skill him. We're not even gonna put that skill on his kind of profile, okay? So now as calls come in, right, so our sales customer just press one for sales, or I guess it's press three for sales, right? So she just pressed three for sales. So the computer system, the software solution is going to look at all of these reps and it's going to know that, OK, Bill, if not even in sales, we don't care about him. Susie is a three in sales, her priority. So should I give it to her?

05:31Well, no way. I'm going to give it to Janie because, because she's a one priority in sales. in sales. So Janie's going to get that sales call and she's going to start taking that call. All right, same thing's going to happen with our, our person who has account issues, right? They just press two for account issues. So now it's going to look at Janie. Well, I couldn't give it to her, but she's on a call. So she's out, right? Bill is a two priority for our account issues. Susie is a one for our account issues. Susie's going to get that call. she's going to start taking it. And then we have somebody who locked himself out. Right? They need a password reset. So now these two guys are on calls, right? The next person who's skilled in it is Bill, right? Bill is going to go and he's going to get that call.

06:22Now, let's say, you know, as things kind of progress and calls are coming in, you can kind of see how the system is going to look not only about the person is skilled in it, But it's going to look at their priority and it's going to send the highest priority that call. Now, this is one way to do skills-based routing. There's a ton of different ways to do it. This is kind of the core way of doing skills-based routing. You can do this on percentage of calls for reps and there's a lot of different kind of nuanced ways that we can do this as well. But we can get into workforce intelligence and talk about how we can move people in and out of skills based on service level and all that. That's for another day. But I hope that this kind of gives you a kind of just a quick overview of skills-based how to understand that the system looks at not only what skill that they're in, but looks at the priority that they're in and tries to get it to the best rep of the best time.