For a brand, it is important that every customer query should be resolved in the least possible time and with maximum customer satisfaction. A customer expects that his/her query should be sent to an agent who has adequate knowledge and experience to resolve the issue faced by the customer. Unified Routing provides routing mechansims where a case can be transferred to an agent who is the best available agent in terms of expertise to handle the case. This is done by creating specific Skill sets and assigning them to the agents.

Skills

Skills refer to any specific abilitiy or area of expertise that is characteristic to a group of agents. For example, in a laptop manufacturing company, a group a customer support agents may have the expertise in dealing with Battery related queries while the other group may have that in Software related queries. These skills can be created in Unified Routing manually and can be assigned to agents based on their knowledge, training, or experience in handling certain types of cases.

Examples of Skills can be -

Language as a Skill - Agents with proficiency in German language can be assigned "German" as a skill. The case, which has a customer query in Hindi languages is tagged with "Hindi" skill, and will be routed to these agents.

Issue type as a Skill - Agents who have expertise in dealing with warranty related cases can be assigned "Warranty" as a skill. Similarly, agents who have expertise in dealing with return queries can be assigend "Order Return" as a skill. This is normally derived by asking customers their problem category using a chatbot or IVR. It can also be detected using AI based intent detection and tagged to a Case.

Skill Categories

Unified routing allows users to create skill categories in which multpiple skills can be clubbed together. This helps in better management of different types of skills and ensuring that skill is assigned to the right agent.

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In the picture above, there are two Skill categories : Billing Issues and Complaint Issues. Under this we have created the relevant skills like Invoice Issues and Quality Complaints respectively. Categorising the skills prevents confusion when choosing the right skill to be assigned to an agent. In the upcoming sections, we will look at how skills are used in routing cases to appropriate agents.

How skills are used in routing cases ?

Here's an example to illustrate how skills are used in Unified Routing.

Let's consider a customer support contact center for an e-commerce company which uses Sprinklr's Unified Routing for assigning customer queries to its users. The company offers support for various product categories, such as electronics, clothing, and home appliances.

1. Setting up Skills and assigning to Agents: Here, we have created three skills, "Electronics", "Clothing" and "Home Appliances" in Unified Routing. Let us suppose there are three agents in the customer support team. Agent A is assigned the skill "Electronics", Agent B is assigned the skill "Clothing" and Agent C is assigned "Home Appliances" and "Electronics".

Now, a customer has sent an email to the customer support team mentioning about the malfunctioning of his washing machine. In this scenario, the assignment flow is as follows :

2. Tagging of customer query with Skills: When a customer's email lands in Sprinklr, using AI, it is tagged with the relevant properties like location, product category, etc. using text recognition and intent detection models. Here, the cutsomer query is tagged with the skills "Home Appliances" and "Electronics". The case is then sent to the customer support queue from where all customer support queries are routed to agents.

3. Skill-Based Routing: The unified routing's intelligent alogorithm then matches the skills tagged to the case with the skills assigned to each of the available agents (A, B, C). It then identifies Agent "C" as the best suited agent who can handle the customer case and the case is assigned. If suppose Agent C is unavailable or already has maximum cases assigned to him, then the case will be pending in the work queue till any agent with the required skills gets available.

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