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Skills-Based Routing: The Tool You Need to Generate Revenue and Retain Customers

By Tim Passios (News - Alert),
Director of Product Management, Interactive Intelligence

If you are looking for ways to increase revenue and customer retention through your contact center, start with skills-based routing. There might be no better project that will have such a dramatic impact in your contact center. Skills-based routing:

• Decreases agent talk time. When customers talk to the best-skilled agent for their problem, they spend less time discussing irrelevant issues.
• Decreases hold times. When agents are more available, wait times decrease.
• Decreases costs. Less talk time means less per-minute charges from your carrier.
• Increases first-call resolution rates. Always a big hitter in driving customer satisfaction.
• Increases the number of interactions handled by your contact center. The faster problems are resolved the greater the number of interactions that can be handled.
• Increases revenue opportunities. When customers are getting their problems resolved faster, they are more susceptible to cross-sell an up-sell opportunities.
• Increases customer retention.

With these advantages, skills-based routing is one of the most valuable and impactful changes you can implement.

Implementation

Consider this your skills-based routing “to do” list.

1. Identify the skills that your customers need
2. Identify the skill-sets of your agent pool that match your customer needs.
3. Segment your agents into skill groups based on their skills. Typically, you will have multiple skill groups because agents have different levels of skills. If the first level of agents is not available, the second level can take the interaction.
4. Define your queues. Depending on your contact center’s technology, here are a few suggestions:
• Basic ACD Technology: Create separate queues for each skill group. While this isn’t very efficient and presents some logistical issues (manually moving agents in and out of queues as demand changes), it achieves the basic goal.
• Advanced ACD Technology: Create one queue and use ACD routing logic to route to the right-skilled agents within the queue. This provides seamless routing to secondary agents when the primary agents aren’t available.
5. Define how calls will get routed to those agents. Here are a few suggested ways:
• DNIS – Offer special toll numbers for your customers with each number being associated with skill groups within your contact center.
• Basic IVR or Auto-Attendant – Use one toll number for all customers and segment customers through menu choices (1 for English, 2 for Spanish, etc.). Again, not the most efficient, but it does work. While customers may not like the additional choices, they get good service which makes them happier.
• Advanced IVR or Bulls-Eye Routing – Use one toll number for all customers, first identify the customer by their ANI, customer ID, account number, etc. Then perform database lookups that identify their account priority, skills needed, products owned, agent last talked to, or a whole host of other possible attributes by which you can route them to the best skilled agent.
6. Train your agents. The better trained your agents are, the better customer service they will provide. Use additional training to fill in the gaps where the largest group of customer skills is needed. If your contact center generates revenue, your agents need to be trained to identify and handle cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
7. Monitor, measure and adjust. Reports are crucial and customer feedback essential in making sure that your plan is working. Monitor changes closely and don't be afraid to make changes to get it right. Implementing call recording, agent scoring and post-call satisfaction tools will help you make the right changes.

Fine Tuning

A good question that usually gets asked is, “How do you avoid having your higher-skilled agents taking all of the calls and how do you fairly compensate them?” First, get your HR department involved early and provide them with suitable compensation strategies and training methodologies. Here are a few other things to consider:

1. Use of workforce management tools - When you implement WFM, you gain the ability to create schedules that help you staff the contact center based on historical interaction volume. This data helps you staff according to the skills that are being projected for upcoming shifts. This overcomes the issue where higher-skilled agents get all of the calls.
2. Motivation – Typically, the more skilled an agent is, the more that agent is compensated. That should be the right kind of motivation necessary for a higher-skilled agent to take more calls. If pay is not a motivator, there are certainly other ways to motivate agents to handle more call volume including earned vacation time, time off the phone, points used towards retail purchases (see www.snowfly.com), etc.
3. Staffing and Training – Hire highly-skilled agents to meet customer demand and train lesser-skilled agents to handle the higher-skilled calls.

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