Engage Voice | Intro to digital routing

The Digital routing section of the platform deals with the digital interactions that route to your contact center from different sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, web chats, and email. When there’s an incoming digital interaction or message, the system will route it to a digital queue and agent based on a set of rules and priorities that you can configure to your needs. 
 
To fully configure Omni-channel digital routing, you’ll be required to work both within the Voice Admin and Digital Admin interfaces. 
 
You’ll first use Digital Admin to create and configure all your sources, channels, languages, and categories. These are the tools that will allow agents to respond efficiently to messages, comments, and issues posted or sent via Facebook, Twitter, and more.
 
Additionally, agents are created in Digital Admin, where administrators can set and assign roles for users, organize users by teams, and ensure each user has the necessary permissions to perform their tasks.
 
Once configuration in Digital Admin is complete, administrators can navigate to Voice Admin and create and configure their digital queues. Digital queues will determine the flow of messages to digital queues and agents based on a set of routing priorities and rules. This flow can range from simple (like routing the next digital interaction to the next available agent) to complex (like routing messages to agents based on customer concerns and agent skills).
 
Those same agents created in Digital Admin must also be added to Voice Admin, where you can configure their permissions in Omni-channel Agent and assign them to digital queues so they can begin handing digital interactions. 


You can create and configure your digital queues under the Routing menu option in the left-hand navigation bar. Here, you can configure and manage your inbound queues, from routing priorities to queue events, weekly schedules, and more.

Digital routing components

Now that we’ve reviewed the basics, let’s talk about how the digital routing system works and get some perspective on how the different parts fit together. One of the first things you’ll do when setting up the system to route digital interactions is to create an inbound queue group to house your queues.

Digital queue groups

Digital queue groups are groups used to organize all of your digital queues. These groups can be differentiated by group skills, which are unique skills that can be used to dedicate specific queues and agents to take specific types of digital interactions. Group skills are created at the queue group level and can be assigned to both a queue (via Queue Events) and to any agents assigned to that queue. 
 
Let’s say, for example, that you have Spanish-speaking customers reaching out via your customer chat and you want to dedicate certain agents for those interactions. 
 
You can start by creating a queue group and assigning it a skill: ‘Spanish Speakers.’ Then you can use the Queue Events feature to assign a ‘Spanish Speakers’ skill to the queue you wish to utilize for this purpose. After that, you can assign the ‘Spanish Speaker’ skill to any Spanish-speaking agents you assign to that queue.
 
Let’s review queues next.

Digital queues

Digital queues are grouped within queue groups and act as the location to which your various digital interactions are routed. As discussed above, digital queues can determine the flow of messages to digital queues and agents based on a set of routing priorities and rules. You can configure routing rules to determine the types of digital interactions to prioritize over others.
 
You can also use your queue settings to create schedules (open and close times) for each queue, set up agent dispositions to record the outcomes of digital interactions, and configure queue events to determine the customer experience while they wait for a response from an agent.

Digital queue routing and routing priorities

Let’s review how digital interactions are routed to digital queues and how you can use routing priorities to determine message destinations.

Routing priorities

Routing priorities consist of routing rules for all digital queues across all your accounts. If there is more than one queue a message could be routed to, routing priorities can be used to determine where a message should be routed first — i.e., the routing rule with the highest priority.
 
Routing priorities are not determined by administrators but are instead based on logic determined at the system’s back end. However, there are two guiding principles the system uses to determine which rules are prioritized over others.
You can find routing priorities by navigating to Routing > Routing priority via the left-hand navigation bar. To learn more, visit Intro to routing priorities.
1. Rules will take priority when they have fewer sources, languages, and categories 
2. Newer priority rules will take priority over older rules

Routing rules

Routing rules determine how messages are routed to agents when they’re in the Messages view. Routing rules consist of a set of digital sources, categories, and languages, and a digital queue can have multiple routing rules assigned to it. 
 
In order to have a digital interaction routed to a specific digital queue, that interaction must arrive from a source, have at least one category, and contain a language listed in at least one of the routing rules created in that digital queue. 
 
Let’s say that you have a digital queue that you would like to configure to accept all Facebook messages in both English and Spanish. You can configure the routing rules for that digital queue by setting the source to ‘Facebook’ and the language to ‘English’ and ‘Spanish.’ Once the rule is created, all messages from Facebook typed in either English and Spanish would be routed to that digital queue. 
 
Remember that all sources, categories, and languages must be configured in Digital Admin.
 
To learn more about routing rules, visit Intro to routing rules.

Priority groups

You can create routing priority groups to establish an absolute priority ranking between queues. When you assign a higher rank to a digital queue in a priority group, digital interactions for that queue will always be prioritized over digital interactions from another queue in the same group with a lower rank. However, keep in mind the priority will only apply when the available agent is assigned to more than one queue in the same priority group. The ranking is absolute in the sense that the system will never dequeue messages from a lower-ranked queue as long as the only available agents are still receiving messages from a higher-ranked queue. 
 
Let’s say you own a company and your phone line has two queues, one for existing customers and one for prospective customers. If your queue for existing customers stays especially busy, you might be worried that your prospective customers will wait too long for a response. In this case, you could create a priority group for these two queues and give the queue for prospective customers a higher priority. 

Priority groups are created and configured via Routing > Advanced settings > Priority groups. To learn more about priority groups, read Intro to priority groups.

Queue priority

You can also configure a queue priority at the individual digital queue configuration level. In contrast to absolute priority, queue priority is a weighted priority that only gives preference to a queue. This means that messages in a lower-ranked queue will continue to dequeue, even if there are still messages in the higher-ranked queue. The system will simply dequeue a higher percentage of messages from the higher-ranked queue.

You can assign queue priority via the General tab in the digital queue configuration page. To learn more about configuring a queue priority, read Configuring digital queue settings.

Skill-based routing

You can determine which agents to prioritize for receiving messages by assigning skills to agents and queues. This might be useful, for example, if you want certain agents to take messages based on a language or product knowledge. 
 
To configure skill-based routing, you first have to configure group skills via the Skills tab in the digital queue group configuration page. After doing that, you will then need to assign those skills to agents via the Skill Profiles tab in the agent configuration page. Lastly, you will need to assign the skills to a queue by creating a queue event via the Queue Events tab in the queue configuration page.  
 
To learn more about skill-based routing, read Creating an agent skill profile.

Agent rank

Lastly, you can prioritize which agents receive messages by assigning ranks to agents. You can rank agents via the General tab in the agent configuration page. This rank applies to agents across all queues they are assigned.
 
Setting an agent rank establishes an absolute priority, meaning that agents with a higher rank will always be prioritized over agents with a lower rank.
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