What happens when an agent completely bungles an incoming call at your call center? This may be the caller’s first experience with your business. A well trained sales agent just isn’t going to be as effective if they’re getting calls from your “Tech Support 2” queue. Your techs may flub sales calls. Obviously you can’t just have calls ringing the phone of anybody who connects to the system.
This is the way simple PBX queues often work.
If you’ve only got three queues and distinct groups of people who should be answering those calls, the PBX queue functionality is probably fine. If you have agents logging into multiple queues, you need something more sophisticated. A call center ACD system that offers skills-based routing will let you:
Anybody who gets logged in can get the call. Anyone who is sitting at a phone that’s been marked as ready for a queue might wind up talking to your Quality Assurance auditor.
- Give calls to certain agents first, only giving calls to others if nobody is available
- Let you assign agents to multiple queues, but only the ones they are qualified for.
As you can guess from the name, skills-based routing depends heavily on the definition of skills. Languages can be skills. Proficiencies and what you would normally call skills are skills.
You want to make sure that your skills are defined well-enough that you get enough flexibility and precision. For example, you might define skills like “Spanish”, “Customer Service”, “Sales”, “Tech Support 1”, “Tech Support 2”, and so on. Then every agent who can speak Spanish will receive the “Spanish” skill. You assign every English-speaking agent the “English” skill. Your best technical support people might get “Tech Support 1” and “Tech Support 2”, while the agent who has just learned the system might get only “Tech Support 1”.
In a skills-based routing queue environment, you can think of a queue as a set of skills. When you’re creating your queues, you then pick the needed skills for each. For instance, the “Tech Support 1 – Spanish” queue will get the “Tech Support 1” skill and the “Spanish” skill. Only agents who have both skills will be put into that queue. This avoids the problem of a non-Spanish speaking agent getting a Spanish call and fumbling it badly.
Skill priorities allow you to distinguish between agents with the same skills. For instance, you might have a “Tech Support 1” queue and have several of your “Tech Support 2” agents working it, just to make sure calls get handled quickly. Or maybe the “Tech Support 2” queue isn’t very busy. In either case, you probably want to make sure that the “Tech Support 2” skilled agents only get calls if a “Tech Support 1” agent isn’t available. Or you want to keep your “Spanish” + “Customer Support” agents in reserve for a call to “Customer Support – Spanish”, and only take calls in “Customer Support” if necessary. Another possibility is that you want your supervisors to only get a call if nobody else is available. The skill level allows you to specify which agents get calls first, and which ones will wait longer.
Along with queue priorities, a full-featured call center ACD system should provide you with all the tools you need to make sure calls get answered by the right agent in the right order.