[January 30, 2002]

Skills-Based Routing: Quantifying Agents' Skills Takes More Than Technology

BY BRYANT DOWNEY

The point of skills-based routing (SBR) is to connect a customer to the most qualified agent as quickly as possible. Great idea, right? But implementing this concept means finding a way to fuse an assessment of human skill with technology. In order to build the foundation to support skills-based routing, supervisors must quantify the skills of their agents. Sometimes that can be as simple as whether your agents speak a foreign language; often it involves categorizing a level of ability, personality, or product knowledge.

In the multichannel world where customers are using e-mail, the phone, and the Web, don't let the various types of contacts complicate the process -- the basis and the prep work behind SBR are consistent across all contact channels.

Creating A Foundation For Skills-Based Routing
The first step in creating an SBR system is to create an outline structure for the products or services your contact center provides. For example, do you provide service support for kitchen appliances? If so, you can base your SBR system on your product line -- then create skill groups based on the types and models of the appliances. If you support five models of dishwashers and five models of refrigerators, you will have 10 areas to focus on for SBR, given that the information and skill level needed to offer customer support for each model is likely different.

Next you need to determine how many skill levels you will have for each product line or information area. You can have a nearly infinite number of skill levels, but is it really worth the effort to organize and quantify them? Keeping the SBR organization as simple as possible is the most effective way to ensure you are getting customers in touch with the most appropriate agent.

Lets go back to the agents that will be handling the five dishwashers and five refrigerators. How do you quantify their skills? There are many options.

Your rating system can be as simple as identifying agents who are able to handle customers' questions about certain product models, or you could use a hierarchal three-tier approach: say Gold, Silver or Bronze agent levels. You could also use a numerical rating of 1 to 10 or even 1 to 100 as your rating system. Just make sure you set up an easily understood method that has enough flexibility to accommodate new products and agents in the future. Each contact center is different, so take a good look at what your center does before deciding on a methodology.

Supporting Skills-Based Routing
Once you have an SBR outline in place, how do you decide where your agents fall within the skill groups? An agent testing and classification system is a good way to determine an agent's familiarity with a product.

You can create a test for each product line, or information area, based on the types of questions coming in to your contact center. If you have a good tracking system in place you should already have an idea of what types of questions your agents are facing each day. Creating these tests could be a hefty investment of time and energy on the part of a supervisor, so before you embark on a center-wide testing bonanza, make sure you test your tests. Select a cross-section of agents with known abilities and see how they do on each test. You can then decide if the test is too broad -- feedback from the agents will help ensure your test is on track. An inadequate test will thwart your SBR system. These tests may also be a helpful HR tool when interviewing prospective agents, as well.

Next decide how the test scores will be integrated into the SBR structure. Using the above three-tier system and a 100-point test scale as an example, a score of 90-100 on the test could result in a Gold rating, a score of 80-89 on the test could mean a Silver rating, and a score of 70-79 could result in a Bronze designation. Anything below 70 could mean the agent is not approved to handle that particular product line or information area.

Depending on the size of your contact center and the skills of your agents, you may need to use a sliding scale to determine the SBR levels. For example, you may need to assign the top 10 percent to Gold, the top 20 percent to Silver, and so on.
Once you have the levels in place, maintaining the integrity of your SBR system is vital to its success. Contact centers change rapidly, due to everything from agent turnover to the introduction of new products and information in which agents must be knowledgeable. Unless you keep your SBR system up-to-date, it could quickly become useless. Testing can be a good way to motivate your agents to learn more about your products -- just make sure the SBR groups are updated after each round of tests.

Monitoring the length of customer contacts can be another helpful tool in determining an agent's skill. If one agent takes significantly longer than others to complete an interaction, they may need to be moved to a lower skill level, given additional training, or need to be taken off a specific product.

Take It One Step At A Time
Implementing a broad, sweeping skills-based routing system all at once would be shocking to your contact center, and the prep work for it would be massive. Just like the process of creating the tests, consider a step-by-step approach to SBR, taking one product or a series of products at a time.

Using the above example of dishwashers and refrigerators, start with only the refrigerators, or even just one or two refrigerator models. This way you can test the validity of the methods by which you are determining SBR levels and adjust them if needed.

The point of skills-based routing is to transparently transfer the incoming contact -- your customer -- to the most qualified agent as quickly as possible. SBR can minimize the duration of a contact, minimize the frustration of a customer, and therefore increase the bottom line of a contact center. It sounds like the holy grail of contact centers, but like any technology solution, without human involvement throughout the process, the value of SBR will remain elusive.

Bryant Downey is the CTO and co-founder of Cintech Solutions. Cintech develops interaction management software to help businesses manage voice and data contacts with their customers, partners, and associates.