Planning your routing configuration

Routing configuration is easy to build and hard to change once a team depends on it. Four questions to settle first.

Routing configuration is easy to build and hard to change once a team depends on it. Four questions to settle first.

1. What decides who should handle a ticket

Be concrete. Is it the subject matter, the customer, the language, the channel, or the difficulty? Whichever it is has to be knowable from the ticket, by rule, at the moment it arrives.

If the answer is "an experienced agent looks at it and decides", that is triage, and you need a triage step rather than routing rules that guess.

2. Groups or skills

• Groups when people belong to a team and stay there.
• Skills when the ability cuts across teams, such as a language or a product several teams support.

Most organisations need groups and a small number of skills. Building skills for everything produces a matrix nobody can reason about.

3. How much is too much at once

Capacity per channel. An agent can hold several emails and perhaps two live chats and one call. Those numbers come from your team rather than from a default, and getting them wrong is felt immediately.

4. What happens when nobody is available

The question people skip. Out of hours, at lunchtime, during a spike: work still arrives. It waits in the queue, which is fine as long as somebody sees it waiting and the customer has been told what to expect.

Start smaller than you think

Group-based routing with sensible capacity covers most teams. Skills, custom queues, subqueues and predictive ordering are all available when you can point at the problem they solve.

See also

• Using skills to route tickets
• Capacity rules to balance the workload
• Turning on and setting up omnichannel routing