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Understand routing

Last Update: Nov 2024 • Est. Read Time: 5 MIN
To check plan availability, see the pricing page.

Routing allows you to organize and collect conversations or tasks and route them to your agents using a set of criteria defined in queue rules. Routing conversations allows you to:

  • Accurately calculate the estimated wait time
  • Track and monitor user availability
  • Measure team capacity against inbound volume for scalability
  • Route custom tasks to teams
Who can access this feature?
User typesAdmins can access the Routing page.


In this article

Key terminology

To better understand routing, the following terms must be defined:

  • Queues
    Buckets, or containers, that organize inbound conversations from newest to oldest. Conversations in a queue are then routed to available agents based on queue rules. See Create and configure queues.

  • Rules
    Customer, conversation, message, or company criteria that determine what queue a conversation should be in. See Create queue rules.

  • Capacity 
    The amount of conversations an agent can have in their inbox. This limit is based on their team assignment.

  • Weight
    The total space allocation a conversation takes up in an agent's inbox. 

  • Routing profiles
    Team-based routing configurations that determine what queues a team can access. See Team routing profiles.

  • Skills
    Route conversations to agents based on a preferred skill set or expertise.

  • Tasks
    Route custom tasks to teams to enhance team productivity

  • Third-party voice queues
    Route phone calls to the selected team and are enabled outside of Kustomer, such as Amazon Connect.

  • User statuses
    The states an agent can be in to determine whether they are available or unavailable for routed conversations. See User statuses.

  • Router
    The logic that takes unassigned conversations from a queue and assigns them to available agents under capacity.

Kustomer routing model

The following diagram illustrates how the queue system works with our platform in relation to workflows, conversation metrics, and routing logic.

Conversation model

When a conversation is created, it will first go through your configured workflows. Once that is complete, the conversation is passed through queue rules to determine which queue it should be in.

Before a conversation, such as chat or voice, reaches Kustomer, we can track when they were initiated and calculate IVR time. This is the time the user spends in the IVR tree for voice. For chat, this is the time the customer spends replying to the conversational assistant. Once queued, we track the time the customer spends in the queue as "wait time".

Queues

With queues, you can automatically route inbound conversations from any channel to agents within Kustomer. Queues use a set of advanced rules with access to customer and conversation data to manage where each inbound conversation is routed. Once assigned to a queue, an inbound conversation will wait for an agent to become available.

Routing can be customized for each team, allowing you to determine how much work they receive and the queues for which they are responsible. Settings help you control whether agents are required to accept conversations and when a queued conversation will time out if it is not accepted.

You can use routing to:

  • Route inbound chats to a chat team.
  • Route email from VIP customers to a VIP team.
  • Route social messages to a social team.

Rules

Conversations will always run through workflows before being sent to the queue rules logic. This means that you can use workflows to set conversation, message, or customer properties that can be used by the queue rules to determine where it will be routed. For example, you can have a workflow that adds a tag to a conversation with an order status of "return request". A queue rule can use that tag to ensure their emails are placed in the Returns queue. This helps ensure you have the most flexibility when routing conversations to agents.

Note: Unlike searches, conversations can only exist in one queue either by queue rules or manual assignment.

Skill-based routing

Skill-based routing directs conversations to agents best suited to assist the customer. Skills can include things like specific expertise in a product area or language proficiency. To learn more, see Understand skill-based routing.

Tasks

Use routing to efficiently manage and delegate work across teams by enabling tasks to be routed to the appropriate agents or departments. To learn more, see Understand tasks.

User statuses

Statuses allow agents to become available for teams and their associated queues. Beyond the need to become Available and unavailable for conversations, user statuses help organizations understand their capacity and the resources required to service customers daily. By creating custom statuses, you'll be able to see when an agent has gone to lunch or might otherwise be unavailable to wrap up a difficult conversation.

Routing profiles

Teams have a routing profile that allows you to determine which queues agents on the team will be assigned conversations from and their total user capacity for their inbox. A router will check queues for new conversations waiting to be assigned against the agents in the team assigned to that queue. The router will then determine which agent gets their assignments based on their user status. If an agent is available and has the capacity, they'll be routed conversations.

Reporting & metrics

Kustomer provides tools to help you analyze your queues and agents' performance.

  • Routing standard report
    The Routing standard report allows you to see your queues and their performance, monitor agent availability, and monitor customer wait time. You can view all your queues in a single report or on an individual level and easily group individual queues together.

    Certain plans also include a Live Dashboard, which updates every 15 seconds. This live dashboard can go full-screen to display your queue metrics on monitors around your office.

  • Team Pulse live dashboard
    The Team Pulse dashboard lets you see your agents' work in real-time and how your queues operate within your platform. The agent dashboard displays your agents' user status, which conversation they are working on, and their current capacity. These live dashboards will help you manage your team and routing more effectively at a glance without directly consulting users for updates.

The user experience

Users will log into Kustomer and have access to their User Toolbar. This toolbar is where all the routing and call functionality exists.

Users on multiple teams can select which team they want to go online for using the status fly-out. Switching teams can be done quickly if agents help across your organization.

  • User Inbox shows the user all their assigned and snoozed conversations and the customers they recently viewed. Once a conversation is closed, the customer will appear in the recently viewed area. Agents that are part of a team that has routing will no longer see the Currently Viewing panel, which shows the conversations that an agent viewed regardless of whether it was assigned to them. 

  • Users on multiple teams can switch between teams with routing enabled from the menu.

  • Users can change their status to control their availability in the router. Users who go Available will get conversations routed to them from their assigned queues. Depending on the settings turned on, when a user goes Offline, their assigned conversations may be unassigned and put back into the queue to be routed to a new user.

  • Depending on the settings turned on, users may need to accept conversations routed to them to reply. If they don't accept it in a determined timeframe, the conversation will move to the next user, and the user who passed on it will be placed into an unavailable status.

  • Marking a conversation done when it has required fields will place the conversation into wrap-up until the required fields are completed.

  • Users can reassign conversations to other users with the assignment options.

  • Reassigning a conversation to a different queue will clear the user and team assignment and place it in the new queue to be routed to a new user.

  • Users can select conversations in bulk and assign them to one of the established queues. Any assigned users or teams will be unassigned when transferring conversations to a different queue.