Unified Routing is a comprehensive system that comprises several modules to streamline the routing of cases to agents. In this article, we will explore how the routing engine works.

Components of Unified Routing

Work Queue

A work queue can be thought of as a virtual container or a holding area where cases are temporarily placed until they are assigned to agents. It provides a centralized view of all the cases that are waiting to be assigned to agents along with those cases that are already assigned. In the work queue settings, users can set the conditions on the basis of which cases can be positioned in the queue for routing.

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Skills Page

In Unified Routing, skills can be understood as specific abilities or areas of expertise possessed by agents that qualify them to address particular types of customer inquiries or cases. Unified Routing allows team managers to create skills and assign them to agent/agent groups based on their specific business needs and the types of customer inquiries they receive.

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Agents Page

In this section, we can see the list of agents and agent groups who are getting the assigned cases. Here, admins can add/modify the skills, capacity profiles, and voice settings assigned to each agent / agent group.

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Capacity Configuration

In Unified Routing, we assign a default of 100 capacity points to an agent. Any case that is assigned to an agent will consume some capacity points of agent. Capacity configuration is used to define how much capacity units one case should cosnume. This is done on channel level where a channel refers to the source category from which the customer is sending message. Example of Channel -

Channel - Social Network

Channel sub category - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

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How Unified Routing Works ?

1. Case Arrival in Work Queue

After a case is processed by the Rule Engine or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, it is routed to any one work queue out of many work queues for further handling. The name of the Work Queue is defined in the Rule Engine / IVR to which a case should go.

2. Positioning of Case in Work Queue

The case is positioned in the work queue based on the work queue settings and case priority rank that is set in the Rule Engine or IVR. When multiple cases are awaiting assignment with same priority, the order of the cases for assignement is decided by the sorting method set in the work queue. The two sorting options are -

1. Work Creation Time - case which is created earlier in the system will be assigned first.

2. Work Queue Assignment Time - case which is assigned earlier to the work queue eill be assigned first.

The basic criteria for this is as follows:

3. Selecting the Best Agent for a Case

After deciding the order in which the cases should be assigned to agent, the next job done by routing engine is to scrutinise every available agent and find the best agent in the work queue to assign the case to. The following parameters are checked (in the order : top to bottom) for every agent -

• Agent Availability Status - Only the agents whose status is in the correct availability status are eligible for assignment.

• Agent's Skills and Proficiency - Only the agents who have all the required skills are eligible for assignment. This matching of agent's skills and the required skills is based upon the Routing Type selected in the work queue. To learn about the different Routing Types, refer to this article.

• Agent's Available Capacity - Here, the routing engine checks the capacity configuration assigned to determine how much capacity units will be consumed by the case. The agent will be eligible for assignment only when the he/she has the minimum available capacity units required by the case.

• Last Case Assignment Time - If the routing engine finds more than one available agents with equal skills, proficiencies and available capacity points, the the agent who has older last case assignment time is preferred.

An example of how the routing flow works is shown below for Routing Type - "All Skill Matching".

4. Assignment to Agent

Once the best agent is found, the case is assigned to the agent and is removed formt he work queue. The pocess in Step 3 repeats for the next case in the queue.

The status of the assigned case is usually changed from "Awaiting Assignment" to "Assigned" by a post assignment rule which is defined in the Work Queue settings. For more use cases on how this rule can be used, refer this article. The assigned case consumes the agent's capacity as per the capacity configuration.

Snapshot of Routing Engine

To summarise the working of Unified Routing, we have Work Queues on one side which store the pending customer cases, and on the other side, we have the list of Agents who are assigned to the work queue to take up the cases.

The routing engine sorts the customer cases based on case priority and case creation time/assignement to queue time. After this, for each case, the algorithm checks the agent parameters like Availability status, Skills, Capacity and Last case Assignment time for every agent and finds the most approproate agent for case.

All the above pocess is executed repeatedly so that any new incoming case or any old pending case shouldn't be left unchecked.