What is skills-based routing?

What is skills-based routing?

Skills-based routing, or skills-based distribution, is a feature you’ll find in customer experience and contact center platforms that automatically routes incoming calls to the right agents based on the agent's skills. Skills-based routing directs callers to the agents who are mostly likely able to help them on the first call (which helps with first call resolution), and minimizes the chance that a caller will bounce from agent to agent to find the right person that can help.

What are other types of call routing?

Traditionally, incoming phone calls get routed to agents in these ways:

• Longest idle: Calls assigned to the agent who has been inactive the longest.

• Fixed order: Calls assigned to agents based on the same fixed order.

• Round robin: Calls assigned to agents based on a rotating fixed order. (If you use “round robin” routing, any time the operators are reordered or an operator is added or removed, the routing is reset. The next incoming call will go to the operator with rank one.)

• Random: Calls are assigned sequentially based on a list of all agents that are randomized every time the list is completed.

Skills-based routing + ACD routing: How do they fit together?

When you’re looking into skills-based routing, you may also have come across automatic call distribution (ACD). An ACD (or automatic call distributor) works like this: A customer calls a company and is greeted by an auto attendant or IVR system. They answer a series of prompts, and then the IVR kicks the call over to the ACD. The ACD uses intelligent routing to send the call to a queue for the best agent available, based on call routing rules you configure according to business needs.

Skill-based routing, then, is one of the rules you configure for the ACD—a rule based on the abilities of your agents and which of them is best-suited to answer certain types of calls.

Other rules an ACD could use might include:

• Parameters based on customized IVR prompts (e.g., “press 1 for customer support.")

• Information the customer entered into the IVR (e.g., account number, address, name)

• Customer profile data

• Agent availability

• Time of day

To use an analogy, ACD is like a radio, and skills-based routing is one of the many stations you can choose to listen to.

How do AI receptionists use skills-based routing?

An AI receptionist can apply the same skill logic an ACD uses for human agents. Instead of only sorting callers into a queue, it can identify what a caller needs and either resolve it directly or route it to the agent whose skill set best matches the request, carrying the context of the conversation along with it.

This means skill matching isn't limited to deciding which available agent picks up next; it can also determine whether a human needs to be involved at all. When it does escalate, the caller is routed to the agent whose ranked skill level best fits what the call needs, the same matching principle behind skills-based routing itself.

What about omnichannel routing?

Customer needs and desires are ever-evolving. Today, many consumers who need customer support don’t always want to call or speak to an agent. They’d rather use other communication channels—but they should still get quickly and effectively routed to the best possible agent to help them.

That’s where omnichannel routing comes in. Omnichannel routing works like a traditional phone routing system except that it also includes channels like:

• Email

• SMS

• Chat

• Social media messaging

• Video conferencing

An omnichannel contact center solution can extend the same skills-based logic to these channels through expertise groups: agents are grouped by what they're equipped to handle, and interactions route to the group best matched to the request. Depending on setup, this can happen through round robin within an expertise group, channel-specific routing, or a combination of both, so a chat about billing and an email about a technical issue can land with different specialists even if they arrive minutes apart. The result is the same principle as skills-based call routing, applied consistently across every channel a customer might use.

How does skills-based routing work?

Skill-based routing works through a series of configurations you set up in your call routing settings. Once you’ve set business hours for your contact center, you can select your call routing rules for when your business is open and closed.

From there, you can choose your routing options, like skills-based routing. You can also change how long calls ring out before they’re sent to a hold queue or other fallback option. Customers will hear a ringing sound and then hold music until their call is answered.

Many communications or CX platforms show you which selections your customers choose most often through IVR. A feature like this can help you determine what choices will serve your customers best, and which options you can retire, so that you can regularly optimize call routing and flow to best serve your customers.

You’ll also want to set up queue priority rules. Queue priority allows you to prioritize which contact center queues are most important, so during busy periods, the most important calls are answered first.

For example, if you want to prioritize highest-value customers, you can create rules to make sure these calls are routed ahead of other calls and to your best agents.

3 key benefits of skills-based routing

Help agents to focus on their strengths

Agents with specific skills and specialties will be able to focus more on interactions with customers where their expertise and skillset can make the most difference. Their call times will often be better, as they’re proficient in their help topic and better aware of the steps needed to resolve the issues that arise. Ultimately, this should help with overall contact center optimization and efficiency.

For example, imagine Agent A and Agent B both work in a contact center for a medical billing agency. A customer calls in because of an error on their bill. Agent A is proficient in Spanish and troubleshooting website issues. Agent B’s skill level is in medical billing, as they’ve received a certificate in medical coding.

Skill-based routing rules would send the call assignment to Agent B as their skillset aligns with that customer’s query. This way, the query would get solved more effectively and more quickly. Meanwhile, Agent A will be free to take a different call (perhaps from a native Spanish speaker).

Specialized teams can help increase customer satisfaction

In most cases, if a customer calls in and receives help from a skilled agent, they’ll have a better customer experience and a higher level of customer satisfaction. A specialized team of skilled agents tends to be better equipped to serve customers' unique questions effectively, which often means higher customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and better service level scores.

To measure how your specialized teams are doing, you can look at their specific CSAT scores. In Dialpad, you can easily set up a CSAT survey to help determine how well your skill-based routing strategy is working.

Reduced call handling times, reduced costs

With customers routed to agents that can handle their calls more efficiently, your contact center will typically be able to reduce the amount of time spent on inbound calls. This could mean reduced costs in the long run.

Consider the 80/20 rule. That’s the rule that 80% of calls (or communications) should get answered in less than 20 seconds. With skills-based routing, you can better ensure that you meet that rule. AI receptionists can also be a useful tool for initial answering, information gathering, and routing to the right agent.

If your contact center is already hitting the 80/20 mark, you could shoot for something more ambitious. Perhaps you could aim for 90/20 or 80/15? By making sure calls reach the best agents the first time around, you can potentially reduce average handle time and allow agents to take more calls in the same amount of time.

Implementing this workflow strategy should be done carefully to avoid agent burnout. However with use of AI tools, skills-based routing, and ongoing support and training for agents, you're likely to gain some efficiency in your contact center.

Skills-based routing and Dialpad AI Agents

Routing rules aren't limited to human agents. In Dialpad's platform, for example, calls that reach a routing fallback can go directly to a Dialpad AI Agent instead of a hold queue, so lower-complexity or after-hours interactions can get handled without waiting on human agent availability at all.

When a caller does need a person, whether because the AI Agent escalates or because the query calls for specialized expertise, the handoff can carry full context with it, including what the caller asked for and what's already been tried, so the human agent isn't starting from zero. Skills-based routing and AI Agents work as complementary layers of the same routing logic rather than separate systems: one decides which human is best suited for a call, the other decides whether a human is needed at all.

4 strategies for improving your skills-based routing set up

1. Know what skills your contact center team has to have

Your contact center agents are multi-skilled. You wouldn’t have hired them if they weren’t. Which of their skills, though, are most important for your customers? That’s what you need to assess as a starting point for your skills-based routing strategy.

Use your current customer interactions as a source of valuable information, including data from your CX platform, CRM, and any other customer intelligence sources.

Look at the most common inquiries your agents handle. Pull out commonalities between those inquiries. For instance, do callers most often have questions about billing? What languages do most callers speak? Are there specific product-related questions that come up regularly?

Those insights can help you identify and prioritize the skills that your contact center agents need in order to improve your customer service. Once you understand these vital skills, you can organize your list by skill group (e.g., language) and then, beneath that, by skill type. Now, you’ve got an initial basis for your skill-based routing rules.

Assess your organization

To set up skills-based routing and make the most of it, you need to assess your current agents’ abilities. Speak to your agents or team managers to determine the overall level of proficiency of your team in the key skill areas you identified earlier.

Then, assess if anything’s noticeably missing at the intersection of what you need and what you have, and develop a strategy to fill in the gaps. Can existing agents be trained to meet those needs? Training may be cheaper than hiring more staff, and career development can help maintain employee morale. Assess your organization and workforce management to determine your best route.

2. Evaluate your team and organize the skills into categories

Once you know what you’re working with, drill down a level to evaluate the skills individual agents are offering and rate each on proficiency.

Start with the priority skills you’ve identified (billing expertise, language proficiency, product familiarity, etc.), but don’t forget about broader, less tangible abilities. Something like empathy or ability to diffuse heightened situations are also key skills—you might categorize these into a set of skills specialized for calls with heightened emotions. Ultimately, you’ll develop a full ranking of your agents according to their separate skills.

3. Set your priorities and routing rules

When you’ve finished your evaluations, you need to organize the skills into categories and determine your queue priorities.

To follow the examples we’ve used throughout, you may decide that billing expertise is your priority skill category. You’d then configure your contact center software to use skills-based routing for calls about billing (which can be identified via IVR or an AI receptionist).

With a skills-based routing rule in place based on those scores, when a caller gets in touch with a billing question, they’ll get passed to your available agent with the highest score. Then, continue similarly for other skills.

4. Keep track of quality and improve the flow where needed

Like most strategies, it’s essential to keep track of how your skills-based routing is working and if it’s improving contact center workflows.

Use call analytics to track wait times, service levels, queue sizes, and other numbers that can indicate the quality and flow of your routing adjustments. You can also visualize call volume and time to answer metrics with heat maps like Dialpad's. This type of analysis gives you a clear picture of where routing may need to be tweaked to improve flow and meet service levels.

How can you use skills-based routing to improve your customer experience?

Skills-based routing is a valuable tool for your contact center, but the overall goal is always the customer experience it supports. Matching the right expertise to the right call means fewer transfers and faster resolutions, which keeps both customers and agents happier.

Almost any contact center handling a high volume of daily inbound calls can benefit from skills-based routing. It reduces handling time and agent frustration, but the strategy behind it matters more than the feature itself. The skill categories worth prioritizing, how granular your ratings need to be, and where AI-driven routing might extend that logic upstream of the queue will look different depending on your call mix and team structure. Use the tips above as a starting point, and keep refining your routing strategy as your team and your customers' needs change.