Call Centre Skills Based Routing

How Skills Based Routing can Transform your Contact Centre

Skills-based Routing is a feature of call centre technology platforms that enables you to direct calls to the most appropriately skilled and experienced agent.

Normally, a call centre ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) allocates (aka routes) a call to the next available call centre agent regardless of their skill or expertise.

Standard practice is that the next call will always go to the agent who has been available the longest.

Using Skills-Based Routing, the call centre manager can start using logic to apply 'rules' to how each call is allocated. 

This enables a range of different scenarios that can result in a better customer experience and a more efficient call centre operation.

Benefits of Call Centre Skills Based Routing

There a numerous benefits of implementing skills-based routing into your call centre with the two primary reasons listed below:

  • A better customer experience - Ensuring the call is answered by a contact centre agent who has the right skills to help the customer will ensure a much better customer experience
  • Improved efficiency - Reduced call handle times, less call transfers, reduced need for customers to call back and so on, implementing SBR will dramatically improve the efficiency of your call centre.

Learn a lot more about the different types of Skills-Based Routing on the ACXPA Glossary >

Implementing Skills Based Routing into Your Call Centre 

The first step is ensuring your call centre phone system (aka ACD) has the capability to provide Skills Based Routing. Then, you need to design your SBR strategy which can take many forms including:

  • Routing customers to agents with particular skills (e.g. in Emergency Services you can have different skills agents who handle Police, Fire and Ambulance).
  • Routing customers based on communication channel skills (e.g. phone, live chat, email etc).
  • Routing customers based on the complexity of the call - e.g. the simpler calls are routed to the less-experienced agents. 

There really is no shortage of options!

A good SBR strategy also needs to allow for different training, coaching, performance metrics, pay sales, etc.

If you need help determining the right contact centre technology for your call centre, or need some help on optimising skills based routing for your contact centre, you may want to consider engaging an experienced contact centre consultant

We've also got a free Contact Centre Technology Guide to help you learn more about available options, as well as a free Contact Centre Technology Wizard that will help you define your requirements to enable informed conversations with potential partners.

We can also provide you with a recommended supplier shortlist to save you time, stress, money, and risk. 


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