Delight Customers Leveraging Skill-Based Routing With Salesforce Omni-Channel

According to a report by Genesys, 69% Australian consumers have the highest expectations and feel most strongly that a company is only as good as its customer service.^[i]

For this reason, businesses today are focusing on customer service and creating an adept workforce of customer service agents.

The journey to building a long-term relationship with clients begins with your customer-facing teams. After all, customer service agents are like front-line warriors, since they are the first point of contact.

And as Steve Jobs rightly said, “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”, it becomes all the more important for a business to understand customers’ needs and offer them exactly what they seek.

Each agent in your customer service function has a different skill-set. 

So, how can you ensure that your customer gets the right assistance and answers, that too across a growing mix of channels? 

Answer – with omnichannel skill-based routing!

To capitalize on the potential of skill-based routing, you ought to ensure that customer service agents have a nifty software solution at their disposal, like the one offered by Salesforce.

And that’s Salesforce Omni-Channel – the magic wand your service agents need to offer engaging and superior customer service experiences.

In this blog post, we’ll explore everything you need to know about omni-channel skill-based routing and how to route cases/chats using skill-based routing in Salesforce.

Let’s get started, shall we? 

What is Omni-Channel Skilled-Based Routing?

With skill-based routing, you can easily assign the right case to the right agent, based on their skills, capacity, and availability. You can create rules that ensure each agent on your team is always assigned cases matching their skill-sets.

For example, Zorg Corp, is a wire and cable manufacturer, and Mark is handling their service operations. He wants to use omni-channel routing to direct customer cases to support agents who can resolve them and who speak the customer’s preferred language. For instance, Mark wants the system to assign the case to a French-speaking agent who is familiar with the billing system if a customer who speaks French has a problem with their bill.

This is a great way to offer the customer a hassle-free experience. 

Why Do Businesses Need Skill-Based Routing?

A skill-based routing model can be beneficial not only for improving the customer experience, but it can also be beneficial for streamlining internal workforce operations. Organizations with diverse product and service offerings typically choose skills-based routing since it makes it simpler to assign work items to agents based on a more complex set of criteria.

Here are some of the most valuable benefits it can provide your company.

Get the Right Agent to a Customer on the First Call

In a study, 41% of customers accepted that they stopped using a product or service after switching reps.^[ii]

That’s where skilled-based routing comes to the rescue. 

Deploying the right agent to resolve your customer’s query will resolve cases faster and save the amount of time your contact center spends on handling calls. And your customer won’t have to waste time and energy on an agent who can’t assist them. A win-win situation, isn’t it?

Improve Metrics for First-Call Resolution

Contact center metrics such as first-call resolution can tell you a lot about your contact center’s health. These metrics help you to understand how many customers you’re able to help right away. It’s much more likely that an agent will solve a customer’s problem during the first interaction if their cases are routed to the right agent. 

Deliver a Higher Level of Customer Satisfaction

When customers think their agent is competent to help them, they feel more at ease. Having an experienced agent solve your problem quickly usually leads to a higher level of satisfaction with the company.

Foster a Higher Level of Customer Retention

Customer satisfaction is closely associated with higher levels of customer retention.

Skill-based routing connects the customer to the best agent no matter the choice of channel, thus, giving them specialized care and prompt solution, will make them more likely to not just stay with you but also spread the good word.

Having read these benefits, now is the time to talk about a tool that makes it easier for you to offer services your customers would love!

What is Salesforce Omni-Channel?

With the increasing number of channels available to customers, your support agents can find it hard to juggle customer concerns coming in from all different directions.

Thankfully, Salesforce has designed solutions that ensure that your customer always receives the service they need from the most qualified agent through their preferred mode of channel.

Enter- Salesforce Omni-Channel!

Salesforce Omni-Channel is a tool within Salesforce Service Cloud – a gold standard for customer engagement solutions.

Salesforce Omni-Channel simplifies handling multichannel customer contacts possible by routing chats, SOS video calls, social interactions, emails, and a number of other custom objects and records to the most qualified agent quickly.

Using the routing criteria you provide, Salesforce Omni-Channel takes incoming work items and assigns them to the most capable, available support agents.

Also, with Omni-Channel Supervisor capabilities, managers can easily monitor agent efficiency and capacity.

When implemented properly, agents gain a hands-on tool to improve efficiency across all channels, so customers receive consistent service across channels. 

Now that we’ve covered ‘why’ you should opt for omnichannel skill-based routing, let’s give you a low-down on how to set it up in Salesforce Service Cloud.

Prerequisites

How to Route Cases/Chat with Skills-Based Routing

A. Skill-Based Routing Rules

2. Choose a skill for each field value.

3. Mark the rules as done and activate them.

In cases where #A doesn’t fit your needs, you can use Omni-Channel Flows instead.

B. Omni-Channel Flows

With Omni-Channel Flow, all the functionality of Omni-Channel is available within the Flow Builder. By defining your routing rules and dynamically routing work to the best agent, you can take advantage of Flow Builder’s power and flexibility.

Note: 

• The ‘Recordid’ field is required; the rest are optional depending on your flow logic.
• To route work to agents who have the necessary skills, identify them, and store them in a record collection variable.

Below are the available and useful flow actions:

1. Route Work: Send work items to Queues, Skills, or Agents.


2. Add Skill Requirements: Add the required skills here, so that the work is routed to the best agent for the customer issue (same as skill-based routing rules). An individual piece of work can have up to 10 skills added in one action and 20 skills overall in the flow.


3. Check Availability for Routing: Add this action to determine agent availability and estimated wait time. This action can return the number of online agents and a number of work items waiting to be picked up given the specified routing requirements, including routing type and parameters.

Pro-Tip: Add your Omni-Channel Flow to a new record-triggered flow for the case/chat transcript object to make routing work.

The Bottom Line

Salesforce Service Cloud offers everything you need to optimize and solidify your support operations. And its powerful feature – Salesforce Omni-Channel, is the next-gen solution your service agents need to provide customers with a seamless, customized experience that fosters higher client retention and conversion rates.

Want to Set-up Omni-Channel Skill-Based Routing to Your Salesforce Service Cloud Instance? Talk to Us!

Statistical References:

^[i] Genesys Report
^[ii] CX Trends