Skill-based routing and one-stop user management help you keep up with customer service demands

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.

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