Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Queues, Users & Skills

At the heart of Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 (apart from the actual communication channels, of course), are Queues and Users, with Skills alongside them. Lets take a look at what these actually are, and how they work.

Queues

Queues are really exactly what they sound like – they’re used to collect and distribute the (communication) workload amongst agents (users). All items coming in, such as Chats, SMS’s, Facebook conversations etc are automatically added to a queue (see more below about using queues to specialise). Agents (being the system users) are added as Queue Members to the queue, and then the workload within the queue is distributed amongst them (based on availability, capacity, etc).

It’s possible to use Omnichannel queues as proxies for specific skills or domains. For example, you can create separate queues for billing issues, investment issues, and so on. When a customer query comes for these issue types, it is automatically routed to its designated queue (as customer would select what they’ve wanting to communicate about).

With the new features of Power Virtual Agents, bots should be able to pick up on the type of query that’s being raised, and route it to the appropriate queue as well.

It’s also possible to assign priorities to queues. All conversations in a queue take the priority of the queue and higher priority conversations are allocated first. For example, if there are two chat conversations coming from two queues with priorities assigned as Priority 1 and Priority 2 respectively, the chat conversation with Priority 1 will be allocated to an agent first.

Users

Users are the actual people that handle and deal with the communications, through the various channels and methods that will have been set up within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365.

There’s a separate post that’ll be around how to set up users, assign security to them, and other necessary information.

Users can have skills set against them (see the Skills section below), and be assigned to be a part of one or more queues. Based on their availability status, workloads from the queues will be assigned to them, that they can then pick up and work with.

Skills

In a customer service centre, or across an organisation, agents (the users) will usually have different skills and abilities that they’ll use in dealing with customers. For examples, these could be language based (ie agents can converse in different languages), technical based (eg for a computer company, these could be desktop knowledge, laptop knowledge, server knowledge, etc), or service based (eg for a local council, this could be around council taxes, rubbish collections, voter registration, etc).

Customers reaching out to the company will have different needs, which will usually be identified in the initial reach-out.

Skill-based routing allows the distribution of the workload (ie the conversation) to agent/s who are skilled in the necessary area, and who are best qualified to handle and answer the situation. This in turn will improve the quality of the customer service, resulting in a better customer experience, which in turn will drive customer retention and loyalty.

It’s also possible to use skill-based routing for multiple required items. Using an example of a computer company, it’s possible to set up skill-based routing that will allow a customer to communicate to an agent who’s a subject-matter expert on servers that are running Server 2016.

Skill-based routing allows you to easily match the conversation to the agent most proficient in dealing with it while maintaining the workload of the agent. You can associate distinct skills with each agent on a team and create rules to make sure that conversations matching those skills are always assigned to them.

The next post (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-queues/) will take a look at how to set up Queues for Omnichannel.