Routing Models | Call Center Technology

Which call goes to which agent? Choosing the right routing strategy is crucial to obtaining high quality of service and managing staff.

The simplest kind of routing sends the oldest call in queue to the next available agent; a strategy that works fine if traffic is very uniform and agents are equally efficient in handling calls. Otherwise, this “next available agent” (NAA) queuing will overburden your most efficient people.

An improvement on NAA entails sending the oldest call in queue to the longest-idle agent, a slightly more intelligent strategy that helps balance call loads. Basic ACDs support both strategies.

The next step up lets you establish groups of agents with a common purpose and similar skills. You can send calls to each group separately, based on choices the caller makes. Inbound calls are sorted through an auto attendant or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system.

An improvement on this is called fallback routing. Calls awaiting a particular group become accessible to a more general pool of agents, so as time passes, callers don’t have to wait if their particular agent pool is busier than others are.

The most intelligent routing is “skills-based” where multiple criteria play a role in matching callers to qualified agents.

Here’s how it works: a call comes in and finds that all agents are busy. Instead of getting to a traditional first-in-first-out queue the call waits in a pool of calls.

When an agent become available, the ACD looks at the pool of calls and decides which one should be assigned to that particular agent. The assignment can be made based on the importance of the caller to your business, the caller’s willingness to wait, a skills match between the agent and what the caller needs, or a combination of these and other criteria.

Callers are identified by their telephone numbers, the number they dialed, or by a pin number they enter into an IVR front end.

Managing an installation setup around skills-based routing is tough because you have to worry about staffing. How do you schedule agents who are “experts” rather than interchangeable?