Omnichannel for Customer Service: Routing vs Work Assignment

When a conversation is initiated in Omnichannel for Customer Service, the conversation is assigned to an agent in two stages.

• Routing – this allows the conversation to be routed to a queue based on specific routing rules allocated to the workstream. It is possible to configure basic routing rules or the newly available Unified Routing feature.
• Work Assignment – this allows the conversation to be assigned to an agent based on the availability and capacity of an agent as well as (if configured) skills necessary to manage the conversation.

I have been creating blogs to slowly document the steps necessary to fully implement Omnichannel for Customer Service. I believe understanding how conversations are routed are necessary to decide which options may be the best for differing situations.

Implementing routing and work assignments in Omnichannel for Customer Service:

• provides the ability for agents to maximise their productivity,
• reduces the time for customers waiting for an agent and
• increases first time resolution by ensuring customers are routed to agents who can answer their query.

Routing Options

• Basic Routing – Leveraging D365 Customer Service’s Routing Rules allows the automatic routing of cases to a queue. In a previous blog, I demonstrated how to configure basic routing to route cases to an omnichannel queue.
• Unified Routing – Unified Routing is a new feature available as from April 2021. The concept of unified routing is to allow consistency of routing AND allocation across all channels. This will now be the default routing experience for all channels including email. In a future blog, I will detail how to configure this feature.

Work Allocation

Once the conversation has been routed to a queue, there are 3 main options which allow conversations to be assigned:

• Skills Based Routing – Conversations can be routed based on skills. Similarly to the functionality of Unified Scheduling. The below video demonstrates an example of skills based routing.

• AI Enabled Skills Based Routing – It is possible to create and train machine-learning models leveraging AI Builder to automatically identify the necessary skills for new conversations. Additional information about this option can be found in Microsoft Docs.
• Unified Routing.

I plan to detail in the steps required to configure Unified Routing and Skills Based Routing in a future blog. I hope that this blog has shown how conversations in Omnichannel for Customer Service are assigned the options available when considering an implementation.