As the world started unwinding from the pandemic, Sarah joined thousands of travelers in booking flights for a long-planned vacation. Realizing she forgot to add her food preferences, she immediately opened a chat on the airline portal. After a long wait, the virtual agent told her to try again later. All the human support agents were busy. She returned after a few hours and started another chat, but she was too late. The chat service had ended for the day. Super upset and frustrated, she left the chat giving the lowest rating.

Busy queues often lead to lower CSAT

Service delivery organizations dread scenarios like Sarah’s, where the customer must wait a long time in the queue, abandons the attempt with a low satisfaction rating, orworst of allboth. Managing workloads effectively during periods of peak demand is a frequent problem for all businesses. Service organizations face the additional challenge of support requests that arrive outside of business hours. Companies are looking for ways to enhance their customers’ experience to drive higher CSAT. Efficient queue overflow management is an essential part.

Introducing queue overflow management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

With queue overflow management, businesses can proactively manage overflow when callers are experiencing abnormally long wait times or a queue has many unassigned work items.

Corrective actions are specific to service channels or modalities. During peak demand, organizations can transfer calls to a different queue or to voicemail or offer to call the customer back later. Similarly, conversations and records can be transferred from an overflowing queue to a different queue.

How to set up queue overflow management

In the Customer Service admin center, select Queues > Advanced queues. Select Set overflow conditions in the Overflow management tile.

Then define the conditions that will determine whether the queue is overflowing and what action to take if it is.

Overflow evaluation happens before a work item is added to the queue. You can think of it as a sort of “pre-queueing” step.

How queue overflow management would make Sarah a happy customer

Let’s return to our excited traveler Sarah to learn how queue overflow management would help the airline avoid a dissatisfied customer. She’s bought her tickets and initiated a chat to add a meal preference to her reservation. The airline now has two queues for customer chats. With customers already holding in one, queue overflow management automatically routes Sarah to the other, where there’s no wait.

Investigate queue overflow events with routing diagnostics

Dynamics 365 Customer Service captures information about queue overflow events in routing diagnostics. Admins can use the information to understand failure scenarios and plan their business workflows accordingly.

Prepare better to serve better

It’s hard to predict peak demand events. Queue overflow management can help. Admins and supervisors are better prepared for contingencies, and customers like Sarah get a faster resolution to their issues.

Learn more

To find out more about queue overflow management in Customer Service, read the documentation: Manage overflow of work items in queues

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

The post Queue overflow management keeps customers happy during peak demand appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Skill-based routing automatically assigns the agents with the right skills to work on customer support requests. With skill-based routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, your call center can reduce the number of queues it operates, improve agents’ productivity, and increase customers’ satisfaction.

To get the most out of skill-based routing, it should be easy to onboard your agents with the right set of skills, proficiencies, and queues. It should be just as easy to modify your workforce configuration to keep up with the ever-changing demands on your call center. With the October 2022 release, Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces a new skills hub and an enhanced user management experience that helps you onboard and manage the agents in your workforce more efficiently than ever before.

One-stop skill-based routing in the new skills hub

Let’s look at a common scenario. Morgon is the call center administrator for Contoso Enterprises, a global e-commerce company. Morgon has observed a surge in service requests around “Returns” in the North American region. Customers are facing long wait times because of it. In response, Morgon wants to make two changes to his workforce.

First, he wants to boost the “Returns” skill and support the additional requests using agents who have lower proficiency in handling returns but can provide timely support. Second, he wants to move some agents from the Latin American queue to the North American queue to assist with the additional demand.

Previously, Morgon would have had to visit separate admin centers to accomplish these tasks. Now he can do everything in one place: the skills hub.

Skills, skill types, proficiency scales, and intelligent skill finder models are all important parts of skill-based routing. The new skills hub is the one-stop place to manage these attributes across your entire call center.

Here’s what you’ll find in the new skills hub:

• An overview of all the skills you’ve configured in your call center and the number of users associated with each one
• A single seamless flow to create a skill, add agents to it, and assign the agents’ proficiency in the skill
• A simple way to add or remove multiple agents from a skill in just a few steps
• An out-of-box proficiency scale to help you start using skill-based routing in as few steps as possible
• An intuitive experience to create or modify proficiency scales

Enhanced user management

Along with skills, Customer Service uses queues and capacity profiles to efficiently route work requests to the agents best suited to handle them. With enhanced user management, you can easily view how your agents are configured across these attributes. Managing the attributes for multiple agents takes just a few simple steps.

Here are some highlights of the new user management experience:

• A page that lists the skills, proficiency scales, queues, and capacity profiles of all agents in your organization
• Search functionality to find agents with specific skills or other attributes
• The ability to update the attributes of multiple agents at once
• One place to manage skills, proficiencies, queues, and capacity profiles of users

You can even enable agents to participate in swarming requests as part of the collaboration features in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

With the new skills hub and enhanced user management, call center administrators can now quickly configure their workforce and make changes on the fly to keep up with customers’ varying demands.

The skills hub and enhanced user management are available as a public preview in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service admin center for all organizations.

Next steps

To learn about the new features and try out their capabilities, read the documentation:

• Skill-based routing in Omnichannel for Customer Service | Microsoft Learn
• Set up skills and assign agents | Microsoft Learn
• Overview of user management | Microsoft Learn
• Overview of unified routing | Microsoft Learn

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

The post Skill-based routing and one-stop user management help you keep up with customer service demands appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.