Enhance agent utilization and engagement with least active routing 

Organizations want to get the best out of their agents by maximizing their utilization, distributing work evenly, and providing enough breaks between calls. Least active routing, formerly known as most-idle routing, is an assignment strategy that can help achieve this. It assigns work to agents based on when they end their last conversation. It gives agents who are working on longer or more complex conversations a chance to take a break, while distributing the new conversations to other agents. Doing so helps improve workforce utilization and engagement. 

How does least active routing help? 

Contoso Health is a multinational healthcare and insurance provider. It has a large customer support organization covering more than 20 product lines, handled by more than 5,000 agents worldwide. Customers call the contact center to get their queries resolved.

In the contact center, an agent can talk to only one customer at a time. Eugenia, the director of customer support at Contoso, observes that some of her agents are being utilized up to 95% in their schedule. Meanwhile, others are occupied only for only 70-75%, and she wants to solve this problem. While doing that, she also wants to make sure not to impact the key metrics like customer satisfaction and SLAs. She comes across the least active routing assignment method and tries it for a queue.  

Kayla and Finn are two agents working in a voice queue. Kayla has a call that comes in at 1:00 PM. Finn takes a call at 1:05 PM. Kayla’s issue is complex and takes her 15 minutes to close. Finn solves his customer’s problem in five minutes. The next call comes in at 1:20 PM. The round robin method would assign the new call to Kayla since it is her turn, and she is available. But with the least active routing, the system considers the idle time of agents and assigns the call to Finn, as his last call ended earlier than Kayla’s. This kind of assignment, considering the idle time, improves the agent utilization.  

The Least active option is available in the Assignment method section of the queue.

The least active routing assignment method is currently available only for voice channel queues and is the default selection for new voice queues. Least active routing can also be used as an Order by condition in the custom assignment methods. 

Build custom reports to monitor an agent’s last capacity release time 

The least active assignment method works based on when the agent ended his or her last call. This data about the agent’s last call end time or last capacity release time, is available in the Dataverse entity ‘msdyn_agentchannelstateentity’. Organizations can use the Model customization feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to build a custom report that provides a view of this data.

Learn more

To learn more about least active routing, read the documentation: Assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Learn

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