Every support team looks for one thing: to be able to resolve customer queries satisfactorily and provide delightful customer experiences. But to achieve this, responses to customer queries need to be quick and accurate. While automation can handle basic questions, many complex queries are still not answered well and on time. And for that, you need a smart system that will route complex questions to an agent at the right time. 

With the help of conversational AI, brands can deflect up to 90% of customer queries from agents. Yet, when dealing with surge and peak times, agents also get a high number of tickets. That’s when the ticket routing needs to be smart. Every minute a ticket is left unattended or assigned to the wrong agent, it leads to a bad customer experience. 

• 60% of customers feel that long holds and wait times are the most frustrating parts of a service experience. (Zendesk)
• 33% of customers feel frustrated when they had to repeat their questions to multiple agents. (Hubspot Research)

This frustrating experience leads to low CSAT. It could also cost a business a customer. 

Keeping this in mind, we’ve introduced Agent Skills. A feature to ensure that your chats find the right agent to assist the user immediately. You must have heard that a stitch in time saves nine. Our newly introduced Agent Skills does exactly that in a smart and slick fashion. If you have an agent who is more skilled to handle a certain chat, you will want to route those tickets to these agents. Correct? In short, our conversational support lets you do that. 

Agent Skills for Smart Routing

Agent Skills-based chat routing is an advanced routing strategy that allocates incoming chats to support agents who are best qualified to resolve them. It adds an extra layer of detail and specificity to our usual auto-ticket assignment. It works by matching the skills required to answer the chat with those assigned to the agent. 

Admins can assign skills to agents based on their expertise. In this manner, you can ensure your customers are getting the help they need in the shortest amount of time, reducing wait times and creating delightful support experiences for both customers and agents alike. 

For example, you run a business in two regions with different local languages. Let’s say one region speaks Bahasa and another Arabic. If a customer chats with you in Arabic, your smart routing system will identify it as a language skill type and allocate this chat to an agent who speaks Arabic fluently. At the end of the chat, both the user and agent are happy. 

A skill can be any attribute that determines an agent’s suitability to work on a chat. E.g.

• Concurrency (number of tickets an agent can handle simultaneously)
• Language (specific languages the agent can speak and write)
• Location (time zones of the agents’ availability)
• Department (the ability of the agent to answer department based query, e.g. logistics, payments, and such)

Agent Skills are based on two elements: Skill and sub-skill

• Skills: They are a broader category for skills. For example, Concurrency, Language, Department, Location, etc. 
• Sub-skills: They are specific attributes of individual skills. For example, under Concurrency skill, you can add Beginner, Intermediate and Expert level sub-skills. English, French, Bahasa, Arabic, Hindi etc. are sub-skills under Language skills.  

Not all of your agents will have the same set of skills – number of chats they can handle simultaneously, languages they can speak, etc. All of us and so do your agents come with their unique superpower. Agent Skills ensures that agents handle the chats with queries that need their superpower the most. For example, with Concurrency skills, you will be able to set a threshold on the maximum number of tickets that an agent should handle at a given time. This number can vary from 3 for a Beginner to 10 for an Expert. 

Some benefits of Agent Skills-based chat assignment include:

• Delightful customer experience as their chat is routed to a competent agent.
• Happy agent experience as they are allocated chats based on their threshold and aren’t overburdened. Turning your losses to win and frustrated customers into happy advocates
• Quick chat resolution time as waiting time is reduced and so are chat transfers.
• Turn your agents into customer champions. 

To know more about how you can make the most of Agent Skills and other features provided by Verloop.io’s conversational AI platform, talk to our experts today.