The customer service team is the first point of contact and the face of any organisation. A smart and diligent client/customer support department is the best marketing tool a business can have, making customers trust the brand and come back for more. It’s imperative to resolve whatever challenges the team is facing to achieve greater customer satisfaction.
The most crucial role of any service centre is routing and operating service requests and assigning cases efficiently. For any organisation, connecting the incoming requests to the most qualified agent for the job is the foundational requirement for improving customer satisfaction.
Companies have been using a queue-based routing system that is not efficient enough to map agent capabilities with the nature of the requests.
Therefore, having a cloud-based customer support centre with a unified routing system is the need of the hour. Microsoft’s Dynamic 365 offers unified routing capability that uses machine learning models to automatically map requests with the most qualified agents based on skill and workload. The streamlined nature of the process makes it truly omnichannel providing a unified view of effort optimisation across multiple channels.
Categorising and Mapping Requests
The unified routing capability of Dynamic 365 addresses and manages the pipeline in two distinct stages: Classification (categorising) and assignment (mapping).
Classification
In this stage, machine learning models are utilised and implemented to tag incoming requests with categories like skills, issue severity, relevant support centre location, and language.
Assignment
This phase prioritises and allocates requests to agents/customer service managers. The task is assigned based on the nature of the work, handling manager’s skill set, stage of the customer journey, and the agent’s/ manager’s availability or workload.
This two-step process alleviates the chances of misroutes and optimises work distribution.
Why Unified Routing?
1. Higher customer satisfaction
Ask any customer who has tried to get through a customer support agent, and he will invariably share his resentment about the long waiting time to reach an agent. The dissatisfaction reaches a different level when the agent is unable to solve the issue and the request is indefinitely transferred to multiple agents.
Since the unified routing system performs allocation based on set metrics like skills, workload, etc., and also takes into account pre-chat questions, the chances of misrouting are reduced considerably.
2. Higher employee engagement
With unified routing, achieving omnichannel distribution becomes easy. It is the age of blended processes that expect agents to work on cases, answer emails, engage with customers on chats and digital messages, and attend phone calls. Unified routing facilitated by Dynamic 365 ensures enhanced capacity management for the blended workforce.
3. Skill-based routing
As mentioned earlier, traditional queue-based routing solutions are not adept at adding the element of personalisation to customer service, which is indispensable for enterprises with varied product categories and customer reach.
Fortunately, the unified routing system adopts skills-based mapping in which incoming requests are directed towards agents that have the capacity and skill to handle them well. This works for agents as well because they get to work on the domain they are comfortable with and deliver higher engagement.
4. Work prioritisation
At times, businesses offer packages with personalised, prioritised, and premium service to select customers. With unified routing, it is easier to allocate priorities to each job helping organisations offer priority services to premium customers.
5. Improve routing precision
It’s the age of omnichannel brand-consumer interaction. Service requests or grievances may come through social media, direct messages, or emails. Unified routing is a great way to tag each request with important details such as the incident/complaint category, severity and priority, nearest support centre from the customer location, and related records.
6. Enhance operational efficiency
Unified routing is not just a great way to work but also an unbeatable tool to gather learnings from the work done. It offers detailed diagnostic traces for each request handled. The organisation can study the incoming requests, the ways they were handled/processed, and gather insights from the observations which always help in enhancing the service quality.
We at C.I.G. Consultants, the best Dynamics 365 CRM Consultancy, can help you implement Dynamic 365 unified routing in your organisation’s customer service. Get in touch with us today to know more.