Comments on: Skill level based routing.

By: Service Untitled » Dell Customer Service Ideas - customer service and customer service experience blog

Fri, 18 May 2007 18:36:19 +0000

[...] “Geek to Grandma” support aka skill-level based routing (which we talked about here). [...]

By: IVR Blog » Skills-Based Routing vs. Skill-Level-Based Routing… see the difference?

Fri, 11 May 2007 12:34:14 +0000

[...] A nice blog I’ve recently come accross that I recommend reading is the Service Untitled customer service blog. One topic they’ve spoken about recently is the concept of Skill-level-based routing and given a pros/cons list on the idea. This topic came up again in an interview they have with Dell’s VP of support, and it’s an interesting topic. [...]

By: Service Untitled

Service Untitled — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:32:04 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Dave!

I agree that saving the information would be quite valuable. Maybe ask for an update every year or so (because I’m sure some skill levels change). Reps could also update it if they feel the customer was more or less experienced than the automatic system though.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:34:12 +0000

Great post! Rating yourself on skill level for routing to the appropriate agent is definitely an interesting idea, and one that I could see employed in a number of companies. I would caution making the IVR system too long / long-winded with a lot of questions or definitions of the skill levels, but these could work if kept brief. Consumers are notoriously impatient with lots of automated talking and choices.

I think this could be taken a step further to help repeat callers though. By asking the caller questions to determine their skill level the first time, then saving this skill level into a CRM system through a database integration with the IVR, the next time the caller calls he/she can be recognized with the saved skill level value and not put back through the questioning process.

I work at a company called Angel.com IVR Solutions and we push our customers to develop an integration with their customer database to provide a more “personalized” experience for the caller. By integrating a database, the IVR system can identify the caller based on caller ID, pull their info from the database and automatically decide how to best handle the call based on certain parameters — such as the skill level saved in the database for the caller. We’ve developed a set of “turn-key” integrated solutions with CRM systems like Salesforce.com, Netsuite and SugarCRM specifically for this.

I think you’re right that the first step is how to appropriately route consumers to the proper place. I think the next step is to help the consumer out and not make them jump through the same hoops the next time when you can capture the data the first time. Can’t wait to see the article on your interview with Dell!