Unified routing gives us the ability to manage the assignment of cases or tasks in a more robust and precise way, which helps teams to manage their resources efficiently and cater customer queries proficiently and smoothly. In this article we will learn about how to manage the prioritization of inbound and outbound calls while assigning them to the agents.

Business Use Case

When a customer calls on the IVR to solve their queries and chooses to connect to an agent, following events can happen-

1. Customer connects to agent.

2. Customer waits on the IVR until the agent is free to take a call.

3. Customer disconnects while waiting on the IVR.

In all the above scenarios, it is likely that brands want to connect back to their customer to help them solve their problems in following ways-

1. Customer connects to agent: After the agent-customer conversation, customer might ask for a callback at a later time to check again on their queries. In this case, the Agent can use Schedule callback feature on ACW or Care Console to schedule a callback for the customer at any preferred time. 

2. Customer waits on the IVR until the agent is free to take a call: During the wait time, we can use the IVR schedule callback feature to ask customers for their confirmation to schedule callback.

3. Customer disconnects while waiting on the IVR: Using the IVR disconnect journey feature, we can trigger a callback to the customer to reach out to them.

For all the above scenarios where we are scheduling/triggering an outbound call, brands can have either the same work queue or different work queue to handle these outbound calls. In case of the same work queue, the inbound calls and outbound calls are assigned to the same queue. Since, no prioritization happens between assignments of these calls to the agents, it might happen that the inbound calls keep waiting to be assigned as the outbound calls can get assigned. 

To avoid this problem, brands want their inbound calls to get assigned with highest priority as these are the customers who are currently waiting on the IVR, and outbound calls can be handled once agents are free.

Solution

Unified routing gives us the ability to prioritize inbound calls over the outbound calls when both are assigned to the same work queue. We need to perform following activities-

1. Work with your success manager to enable this capability in your environment.

2. Use the Set Priority Node in IVR to set priority of Inbound Calls to greater than 1 (ex: 10, 50, 100)- As the outbound calls will not be tagged with any priority, inbound calls with any priority will get assigned first.

After doing the above configuration, whenever an inbound and outbound call are present in the same queue at the same time, and an agent becomes available to take calls, they will get the inbound call first.