Skills-based routing aims to make customer service more efficient and assertive, bringing the right person at the right time to answer your customer’s needs.
Looking at a basic call routing procedure, omnichannel routing (contacts distribution process) works just like routing calls in traditional call centers – except it includes more channels, such as e-mail, SMS, or video.
A contact center must choose its best call-assignment strategy: skills-based routing, most idle agent, most available agent, last agent routing or cascade.
If your customers complain about having to go through multiple service reps before solving their queries, maybe you should consider skills-based routing.
So, what is skills-based routing?
Skills-based routing (SBR), or skills-based call routing, is a routing strategy used in call centers to allocate incoming calls to the most suitable agent, instead of simply choosing the next available agent. This routing system matches callers to agents based on required skills, like language spoken or areas of expertise.
By providing information about your agents’ particular skill set, you can easily define how customers should be routed in order to be matched with the most qualified agent for their particular need. This routing strategy ensures that our customers feel valued and enables business to provide exceptional service experience, improving customer experience.
What are the key benefits of skills-based routing?
The improvement of customer experience is probably the most evident benefit a contact center can get from skills-based distribution, but it can also improve internal workforce operations.
Let’s take a closer look at the specific benefits:
- Improve customer satisfaction
Skills-based routing ensures that customers are assisted by the right and skilled agent who has the right tools and knowledge. Customer satisfaction is increased when a contact center has a specialized team with exceptional skills. This guarantees that problems are delivered to the most highly trained agents for the specific matter.
- Increase first-call resolution
Skills-based routing finds the perfect match for your customer. Calls are distributed to agents with relevant skill sets, increasing their chances of solving the issues right away. This enables call centers to reduce handle time and increase first call resolution.
- Reduce agent training
If you identify the relevant skills that a contact center agent already has and build a routing strategy based on them, you can reduce the agent training.
- Performance management
Skills-based routing can also improve the performance and productivity of agents. Allowing a particular agent to handle requests that are more in line with their assigned skills can reduce their average time with callers. This allows them to assist more people more efficiently.
How Collab can help you
The contact center software and its articulation with CRM and business application is essential to deliver exceptional customer experience. In Collab, we offer you a 360º contact center solution that combines multiple communication channels, all in the same interface. OneContact provides several routing strategies built-in into its Intelligent Router. These strategies are immediately available, with no need to design specific routing scripts. One of the provided options is the skills-based distribution. Feel free to get in touch with us if you need any additional information.