Tag: queues

New functionality for Routing Rules

Within Omnichannel, we have the ability to route conversations based on different factors. At this point in time, there’s Skill-Based routing (covered at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-ii/), and Workstream routing (covered at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-pre-survey-responses-routing/).

Routing is used to send customer interactions to specific queues, in order to have them handled by the agents best suited. This could be based on the language that the customer is using, the query that the customer has (involving pre-chat survey questions), etc.

The way that this is done (included in the previous articles) is by selecting the details that we want to use. This could be the contact (when recognised as a record in the system), pre-chat survey responses, or several other options.

However, to date we’ve only been able to use fields/variables from the chat session itself. It’s not been possible to connect to other data that we’re holding within the system, and use that for routing. We’ve only been able to use items that are directly linked to the conversation:

  • Account
  • Case
  • Contact
  • Context Variable
  • Live Chat Context

So if we had identified the customer as existing in the system already, we weren’t able to query related records to them, eg accounts etc. That’s all changed now though – we are now able to do this!

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Let’s see an example of this. We have a customer, and we know from within Dynamics 365 that his company is a VERY large customer of ours. They spend a great deal on our products every year, and as a result, we want to route any interactions with them to a special VIP queue. Previously we were unable to do this, unless we somehow set a flag on the contact record to display this.

What we’re now able to do is go and get values from the linked account record, and use these as the routing variables within the workstream:

We can add multiple rows here, all connecting different parts of the data.

Note: The only caveat is that the entity needs to be linked to one of the Omnichannel items (which are listed above). We can’t daisy-chain non-related entities, eg Contact-Account-Invoices

These can obviously be put together in groups, to satisfy more complicated conditions, using AND/OR conditions. With this, we can therefore address very specific scenarios, tying together conditions across multiple entities.

Even nicer, we’re not restricted by the relationship type. We therefore can select an entity that’s related to the primary Omnichannel entities as:

  • One to Many
  • Many to One
  • Many to Many

With this being in place, we’re now really able to ‘fine tune’ how we can route customer interactions, and set up specific places for them to be directed to. Through this, we can identify & serve identified sectors of our customers in different ways, as we feel is best appropriate.

This is also applicable to skill attachment routing, where the same level of functionality is provided.

So with this in mind, how would YOU think that you would go ahead and use this? Leave a note in the comments below!

Omnichannel – Pre Survey Responses & Routing

I’d like to start off here by admitting that in a previous blog post that I put up, I mentioned that it’s not possible to route customers to different queues through the chat itself. That was wrong – thankfully several very nice people at Microsoft reached out to let me know how it’s done (thanks BTW for reading my blog!). I therefore thought it would make a good article, as people do ask me about this from time to time.

So, how exactly does Omnichannel facilitate this? Well, there are two parts:

  • Pre chat surveys
  • Routing rule items

Pre chat surveys

These surveys are really quick & easy to set up (or even more complicated, if you so desire). To start getting to grips with them, open a Live Chat record, and go to the ‘Pre-chat survey’ tab

Here, you’ll be able to set up your questions, which is done by clicking the ‘Add Question’ button. When you do this, you’ll get the following prompt.

So, three of the four questions are really quite simple. You need to give it a name (as every system record needs), the actual question text, and whether it’s mandatory or not. The fourth question ask you what sort of question type you’re looking for. The options available are:

  • Single line of text
  • Multiple lines of text
  • Option set
  • User consent

If you select ‘Option set’, you’ll be prompted to enter the values. These should be separated by a semi-colon character:

With our pre-chat survey questions being set up, let’s see how we go ahead and use them for routing.

Workstreams

If you go ahead and open up any workstream record, you’ll see several tabs available. Two of these tabs are Context Variables, and Routing Rule Items. There’s usually one workstream per chat channel, with setting options within it as required. Opening up the workstream for the Live Chat, we can see them there:

Let’s take a closer look at the Context Variables first. Going to this tab shows us the following:

Woah. Where did those entries come from? I didn’t enter anything here – though I can create context variables if I want to.

Well, remember those pre-chat survey questions that we created? Each time one of these is created, it creates a context variable record for the workstream that the chat is associated to. So each of my questions (and I have four of these) now have a corresponding entry.

OK – so the system does that. But how does that help me when looking at trying to route things?

Simply put, these are the building blocks that we’ll set up in the Routing Rule Items to flow the customer chat through to an appropriate location. Let’s go and create one to see what happens.

We need to set the queue that this rule to apply to. Then we’ll go ahead and set the condition/s that we’re wanting to apply for this queue. There are several different possibilities to start with:

Selecting the entity that we want to use for the rule will then allow us to pick an attribute for that entity. So;

  • Account, Contact, Case & Live Chat Context will give an option to select one of the attributes from the entity
  • Context Variables will give the available context variables to choose from

You’ll then be prompted to select an Operator. These will vary depending on the type of field (eg a number field will have additional options such as Greater Than, Smaller Than, etc)

Finally, you’ll enter the value that you’re looking to match with for the condition. This is free text (it’s not auto-populated with values). So in summary, you’ll have something like the following:

And tadaa! it’s active. Brilliant!

We’re able to stack up multiple conditions to cover specific scenarios. An example could the following:

  • Customer has a Kawasaki motorbike (not a different make)
  • Customer’s annual spend falls into the ‘high spend’ bracket

There are plenty of other scenarios that can be covered, and the conditions allow this to cover quite complex situations.

So, some things to note around workstreams & routing rule items:

  • You can have multiple routing rule items per workstream, each one routing to a different queue. These are evaluated in the order that they’re saved in. Eg if there are 4 rules, an incoming chat will be evaluated against rule 1, then rule 2, etc
  • When a routing rule condition is met, the chat gets routed to the destination. No other evaluation against the remainder of the rules is carried out

I hope that this has come in useful, and put some interesting thoughts into your mind as to how you could implement this at your organisation or clients!