DerivingValuefrom
Skills‐BasedRouting
A Guide to Implementing Skills‐Based Routing Effectively TableofContents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3 What is Skills‐Based Routing? ............................................................................................. 3 The Benefits of Skills‐Based Routing ................................................................................... 5 Who Should Use Skills‐Based Routing? .............................................................................. 5 Best Practices Using Skills‐Based Routing ........................................................................... 7 Make it Beneficial for the Customer ................................................................................ 7 Maintenance Should Not be Overwhelming .................................................................... 7 Consider the Agent Experience ........................................................................................ 8 Additional Considerations for Skills‐Based Routing Design ................................................ 9 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 10 Copyright © 2012 Interactive Intelligence, Inc. All rights reserved. Brand and product names referred to in this document are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 7601 Interactive Way Indianapolis, Indiana 46278 Telephone/Fax (317) 872‐3000 www.ININ.com Rev. 12/12, version 1 © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 2 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing Introduction
The modern contact center is a company’s primary resource for delivering a differentiated customer experience and driving efficient and cost‐effective customer satisfaction. Top tier contact centers make regular investments in advanced technologies to assist them in the delivery of the desired customer experience, including intelligent call delivery systems that enable skills‐based routing. WhatisSkills‐BasedRouting?
Basic skills‐based routing enables a contact center to exploit the benefits of a specialized workforce while harnessing the economies of pooled resources. Skills‐based routing utilizes identifying data (customer inputs, database lookups, dialed number, etc.) to determine the expertise required to handle an interaction, and delivers that interaction to the agent best equipped to serve the customer. A more progressive approach to skills‐based routing leverages agent proficiency by considering degrees of capability within a skill. Additional intelligence can be incorporated into call delivery strategies to dynamically adapt routing based upon business criteria and conditions. Prior to the advent of skills‐based routing, contact centers were restricted to the limited routing options available with basic ACD routing. Traditional ACD routing allows a contact center to create numerous groups of specialized agents. This approach is able to deliver expertise within a single skill, but lacks the efficiency provided by skills‐based routing. Conversely, contact centers could garner efficiencies by pooling resources. However, in this scenario, agents either serve as generalists or super agents. As generalists, agents have a higher propensity to transfer calls since they may not possess the expertise to handle complex issues. Super agents on the other hand, possess expertise in all areas, but must go through extensive training before handling any interactions. The organization that pursues this strategy invests heavily in initial training of new agents and recurrent skill‐specific training for the entirety of the staff. Exhibit A illustrates a comparison of an ACD environment using specialized resources and another example using pooled resources. Consider a contact center handling 400 interactions, proportionately distributed across five skills, with an average handle time (AHT) of 210 seconds and a service level target of 80% handled in 20 seconds. Using specialized agents, the contact center would have to staff 65 agents. If this same contact center opted to staff with generalists or super agents, the staffing requirement decreases to 53 agents. Exhibit A: A purely specialized environment offers greater expertise, but is less efficient than one that pools resources © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 3 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing Skills‐based routing allows a contact center to derive some benefits of both methodologies; it allows for specialization through skilling and garners the benefits of pooling resources, illustrated in Exhibit B. This approach allows for new agents to gain proficiency in a single skill and enter into service sooner, yielding rapid productivity gains for the contact center operation. Moreover, the contact center has the opportunity to measure an agent’s potential to determine how much of an investment to make in training and up‐skilling a particular agent. Exhibit B: With basic skills‐based routing, a contact center benefits from pooling agents while having the capability to deliver specialized service. Agents may have as few as one skill or carry all skills, making them super agents. Exhibit C demonstrates a progressive skills‐based model that considers business criteria and conditions to decide how to select agents for routing queued interactions. For instance, on weekdays during business hours where conditions are in line with expectations, primary skilled agents will be staffed to handle demand. But during the overnight shift, on weekends, or on holidays, demand is sporadic and primary skilled staffing is limited. Based on these criteria, progressive skills‐based routing would queue interactions for any primary skilled agent plus additional resources with a lower route score as defined by business criteria. Such criteria can be established for other conditions based on performance; this could include triggers set to service level, ASA, or abandonment rate thresholds. These triggers are established as part of a contact center’s contingency plan. Skills‐based routing is not intended to replace nor supplement a comprehensive planning process. In an event where demand or staffing shifts significantly, the triggers can automatically initiate a change to call delivery and reprioritize interactions to the organization’s specifications. Exhibit C: In a progressive skills‐based routing model, proficiency defines the agent’s rank order or route score. Based on business criteria, this is used to determine the conditions in which the agent should be selected for a specific call type. © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 4 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing TheBenefitsofSkills‐BasedRouting
In addition to the balance of efficiency and specialization, a well designed skills‐based routing model yields a variety of performance and relational benefits. 1. Get the ability to realize productivity gains rapidly by training on a single skill and putting agents into production, followed by formulating a progressive training program for an agent based on potential contributions to the organization. 2. Increase quality and customer satisfaction as customers find their inquiries handled quickly by an agent with the requisite expertise to handle the interaction expediently, accurately, and without transfers. 3. Achieve consistency in service levels by interval with a skills‐based routing model that dynamically adapts based on business conditions. In advance of queuing an interaction, the routing model can assess the current conditions of the operation to determine how narrow or broad the agent pool needs to be to improve the likelihood that an interaction will be answered within the service level threshold. As mentioned previously, this capability is intended for the purposes of contingency planning, and should not be used through the course of normal business. 4. Reduce handle times by directing interactions to agents with the requisite expertise, rather than to agents that may have to refer to alternative sources before adeptly addressing customer questions. 5. Decrease error and re‐work rates as interactions handled by agents possessing a high degree of competency within the skill increase. This would also include reducing the number of customer call backs, resulting in a higher first call resolution (FCR) rate. 6. Increase agent satisfaction and retention; agents benefit in that skills‐based routing empowers them to create career path options. Agents are given the ability to develop an expertise in specific areas of interest, and to acquire the skills that accompany the expertise they have developed. WhoShouldUseSkills‐BasedRouting?
It is not uncommon for organizations to implement technology without understanding if it has applicability to their line of business. Often decision makers want to exploit a technology to gain the first mover advantage, or believe that their business must use the exact same tools as “leading” businesses. Before making a sizable investment in technology, it is important to not only understand the benefits of the technology, but also its applicability. To make this determination, it is important to distinguish between the various types of skills, which include proprietary skills, technical/industry skills, behavioral skills, and passive skills. 
The most common skills are proprietary skills, which require training specific to products or services offered by the organization, such as billing, scheduling, reservations, or parts. © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 5 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing 


Technical/industry skills include expertise that requires special training, although these skills are not unique to the organization. Examples of this would include language proficiency, technical troubleshooting, or expertise that requires professional licensing, like insurance or brokerage services. Behavioral skills include softer skills important for relationship management. These could be variations, such as an agent’s demeanor that is direct and to the point in contrast to one that is patient and nurturing Behavioral skills are typically not used outside of a relationship based model. Passive skills assigned by the organization are completely transparent to the agent and customer. These would include skills pertaining to geographic alignment or team assignment. After determining which skills and types of skills are relevant to the business, the next step is to decide if those skills can be taught or if agents possessing the skill should be hired. A common example is with language skills. It is unlikely that an organization would hire and then train agents to speak a second language. More often the organization will hire agents already possessing proficiency in the desired language. While this may not be a determining factor for using skills‐based routing, it becomes a question of how important is it to provide this level of expertise if it requires hiring to fulfill the need. If the relevant skills are those that agents can be trained on in‐house, it is important to determine if there is ample customer demand to sustain new agents only possessing a single skill. Also, how large is the difference between investing in training on a single skill versus all skills. The investment in this case should be considered in terms of both time and money. If demand is limited, or if there is not a considerable investment to train on all skills in comparison to a single skill, it may not be advantageous to pursue skills‐based routing. The final consideration when deciding whether or not to adopt skills‐based routing is scale. There is no prescribed size that a contact center must be to leverage skills‐based routing. However, it is typical that smaller contact centers maintain agility to ensure delivering against their objectives. By implementing skills‐based routing, a limited resource pool can become segmented. This inhibits the nimbleness of the operation, since the greater number of skills, the less flexibility. Before making the decision to implement any skills‐based routing solution, take the time to evaluate the existing operation, and perform a gap analysis to understand the barriers hindering the process to get to the desired state. It is at this point the contact center can build a case to demonstrate that skills‐based routing will deliver real value to the business. © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 6 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing BestPracticesUsingSkills‐BasedRouting
The options with skills‐based routing seem nearly endless, and it becomes easy to embark on the journey to develop a robust and grandiose routing plan. When planning for complete integration and a variety of dependencies, it’s easy to believe that the perfect routing can be designed to handle any changes to the operation. However, at implementation it becomes apparent that the overwhelming complexity has made it difficult to understand exactly how interactions will flow during differing conditions, and determine if there are sufficient resources to handle the maintenance required to sustain this routing scheme. Excessive design complexity inhibits transparency within work flows; the absences of clarity as to how and why interactions traverse specific decision points render the design unmanageable. To ensure a successful implementation, it is critical to ensure that the routing plan is relevant and simplistic enough to manage. In a contact center, complex routing plan designs can often create the illusion of delivering the optimal customer experience. For example, it is common to offer high priority customers specialized service, which includes interacting with a dedicated agent. If the agent is unavailable, however, interactions queue for a larger sub‐set of agents for a set duration. Every few seconds, this pool grows until an available agent is identified. While it’s commendable that the organization values its priority customers so much as to make efforts to foster one‐to‐one relationships with them, it is improbable that the customer will connect to the primary agent. In this scenario, it is likely that the primary agent is handling an interaction for which they are not a primary agent, and this is likely true of all agents. The design forces high value customers to instead hold unnecessarily. If the call had queued for all agents with the desired skills, the rate of immediate answers would increase, average speed of answer and abandons would decrease, and the quality of service would remain neutral. MakeitBeneficialfortheCustomer
When developing a skills‐based routing model, the design should lend itself to delivering value to the customer. Either the customer must realize the implicit value of skilling, or skilling must contribute to improved management of the operation, yielding ancillary benefits to the customer. In some cases it is obvious how customers see benefits of skilling. When calling regarding billing, for instance, it is logical to connect the customer to an agent with an expertise in billing. There might also be a geographic alignment that ensures a customer calling from the Eastern Time zone connects to an agent in the same time zone. The geographic alignment may offer no intrinsic value to the customer, and may add unnecessary complexity to the routing. As in this example, however, if billing rates or policies vary by geography, routing by geographic alignment makes sense to connect the customer to an agent with the expertise in billing for the desired region. MaintenanceShouldNotbeOverwhelming
Simplicity in design is imperative, especially when delving into the advanced options available through any skills‐based routing tool. There is an abundance of criteria available to add intelligence to routing. When developing conditional routing, select the © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 7 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing variables that are directly tied to business objectives or measures of success. For example, if designing dynamic routing based on service level objectives, design one call flow for normal operations and another that triggers a contingency plan when a service level falls significantly below the target. When service levels are within the acceptable normal range, interactions should be directed to the agents considered primary for the skill. In a contingency scenario, interactions should target all resources possessing the required skill, regardless of proficiency. Additionally, the same rule applies to using proficiencies This feature offers seemingly unlimited degrees of freedom, although it is nearly impossible to distinguish the ability of an agent on a scale with an extensive range. Rather than employing ability from 1 to 50 or 1 to 100, simply select three levels to represent expert, intermediate, and novice skills and define each level clearly. This practice will simplify managing proficiency at the agent level, and will also add clarity in explaining why an agent was or was not selected for a specific call type. ConsidertheAgentExperience
Keeping the agent involved and getting their buy‐in is critical to the success of any skills‐
based routing model. Following are a few simple practices that will contribute to empowering agents and building morale. 1. Distribute interactions equally. When making skilling decisions, strive to maintain an equitable distribution of interactions across all agents. Agents with a high occupancy rate feel overworked and resentful that other agents do not have to work as much. Agents with a low utilization rate often feel undervalued relative to their peers with high utilization. 2. Set a career path for agents. Develop complementary groupings of skills that delineate a clear career path for agents, and make certain that agents have a voice in deciding which path they should pursue. This helps agents pursue areas of specialization that interest them and will leverage their strengths, which ultimately leads to a better customer experience. Furthermore, it is advantageous to offer incentives to acquire additional skills as motivation for agents to proactively pursue the skills that will provide greater flexibility in staffing for demand. 3. Limit the number and types of skills. Limit the maximum number of skills an agent can possess. It is enticing to build teams of super agents who can handle anything that is presented to them; however, in complex business environments it becomes overwhelming. To maintain their skills, these agents spend more time in training rather than serving customers. Also, these agents tend to possess a breadth of knowledge rather than depth of knowledge. Because they have to learn and retain so much, it becomes difficult to develop real expertise in any one area. 4. Offer transparency and set expectations. Offer transparency so agents can see what skills and proficiencies they currently possess. This sets expectations with agents in regards to the types of interactions they should receive. Additionally, if they receive interactions they don’t anticipate, the agent will be positioned to raise this as an issue to help identify potential misrouting of interactions. © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 8 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing 5. Adhere to a quality program. A robust quality program must be in place and be equipped to monitor and respond to service delivered during the course of normal business, as well as in triage situations. A quality program should monitor calls for all routing scenarios, although the purpose of evaluation might change and require separate scorecards. Through the normal course of business, a quality program evaluates an individual agent’s performance and offers coaching appropriately. In a triage situation, the focus shifts to understanding the customer experience and less on the agent’s performance. The intent is to identify points of frustration for the customer and define opportunities to create the best customer experience during operationally challenging times. 6. Determine agent proficiencies using clear qualifying criteria. Determining proficiencies can be daunting. But if defined with clear qualifying criteria, it becomes easy for all parties to understand and define agent skill levels. This can be accomplished by relating proficiency to the completion of specific training or through the administration of certification exams. AdditionalConsiderationsforSkills‐BasedRoutingDesign
As with any enhancement or upgrade there are always challenges to overcome, and skill based routing is no different. While it is not possible to avoid these pitfalls, the impacts can be minimized by being considerate of the design and ensuring its simplicity. By pursuing complexity, contact centers are subjected to various risks that have tangible consequences on the operation and on the customer experience. To offer a superior customer experience, it is vital to keep IVR and routing menus simple, typically no more than three layers with a maximum of four options within each layer. It is tempting to collect extraordinary amounts of data up front to deliver the interaction to the perfect agent. Doing so frustrates customers, however, leading them to select the options that they believe will get them to a live agent. This yields a high transfer rate and erroneous data that will be used for planning and decision making. Also, the implementation of a large number of skills produces a fragmented view of types of interactions. This introduces smaller sample sizes and increases the margin of error in the forecasting process. To overcome this, most operations begin overstaffing to ensure that business objectives are met. However, overstaffing is in conflict with the expected benefits of skills‐based routing, as it is intended to increase efficiency. Moreover, when considering a skills‐based routing platform, it is important to ensure that the routing options can be applied reasonably across various media types. It is vital to be able to provide a consistent experience regardless of the preferred channel a customer might use. With an excessive number of skills, quality and coaching programs become equally complex. Support staff in these areas must possess the same skills as the agents being monitored in order to be successful in guiding agents to deliver the best service and appropriate solutions to customers. © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 9 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing Finally, when dealing with teams representing a number of skills, team meetings become less meaningful. Some managers adapt their message to be more generic and applicable to the entire audience while others will provide messaging to each individual skill. In the first case, not all pertinent information is shared. In the latter case, resources not holding the skill will become disinterested. Conclusion
Skills‐based routing presents a contact center operation with a number of challenges. But, if skills‐based routing is an appropriate solution and is well designed, it adds real value. The right solution will limit downside impacts while bolstering the customer experience by quickly connecting customers to motivated agents who have the knowhow and capability to help. As with all decisions and tasks, be certain the call routing solution and design are congruent with the mission of the contact center and are aligned with the prescribed customer service objectives. In addition, bear in mind, technology cannot replace good planning. However, planning does make for a good bedfellow, so make the effort to invest in planning to ensure that the right resources are available at the right time to elevate a routine customer service experience to an exceptional one. Identifying the right solution for skills‐based routing and navigating the available options is a complicated endeavor. By following the guidelines provided and employing consulting resources with the design expertise, an organization can maximize the value derived from a basic or progressive skills‐based routing solution. © Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 10 Deriving Value from Skills‐Based Routing