Understand Queue-Based Routing
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how queue-based routing works.
- Explain how Omni-Channel determines the priority of work items.
- Set up queue-based routing for Omni-Channel.
How Does Queue-Based Routing Work
Maria Jimenez, Ursa Major Solar’s fearless systems admin, gets ready to try out queue-based routing in Omni-Channel. Before she starts, she wants to know how queue-based routing pushes work to reps.
Get the Most Important Work to Reps First
Prioritizing work by importance and quickly resolving the highest priority work is, well, a high priority for contact centers.
Maria learns that Omni-Channel always prioritizes work in the same way regardless of which routing method you use. Omni-Channel uses three factors to prioritize a work item.
- First, it considers the priority of the queue from which the work item came.
- Next, it considers the amount of time the work item has been waiting in the queue.
- Finally, it considers the members of the queue who are available to receive new work items.
Organize Work and Reps into Queues
When you set up queue-based routing, you create a queue, then set the queue priority, and then assign reps to it. You can think of queues as different buckets that Omni-Channel drops work into. A queue can represent a skill, such as Spanish; or expertise, such as technical troubleshooting; or a company department, such as Billing.
Define Routing Configurations
Next, you create a routing configuration to set the size and priority of different objects and to select the routing model that Omni-Channel uses. The routing configuration determines how Omni-Channel routes work to reps.
For example, a real-time web chat can have a higher priority than a case, because you’ve got a customer on the other side of the chat who wants to talk with a rep right now. A case can have a larger size than a chat, because working on a case can take up more of a rep’s time and energy than responding to a web chat.
In the routing model, you choose whether to push work to reps who are Least Active or Most Available. If you select Least Active, then Omni-Channel routes incoming work items to the rep with the least amount of open work. If you select Most Available, then Omni-Channel routes incoming work items to the rep with the greatest difference between work item capacity and open work items.
Manage Rep Workload
When Omni-Channel routes work items, it considers a rep’s capacity to take on more work and their current availability. So one rep doesn’t get overloaded while others wait for something to do.
Manage Rep Capacity
Rep capacity looks at the number and types of work items that are assigned to a rep, and at the rep’s overall bandwidth. You give each type of work—a case, a chat, and so on—a unit of capacity that represents how much rep bandwidth it takes up. And you give the rep a total capacity that indicates when the rep is working at 100% of capacity.
For example, suppose that cases each take 5 capacity and that chats each take 2 capacity. Let’s say that a rep has a maximum capacity of 10. In this situation, a rep can work on two cases (5+5=10) at a time. Or the rep can work on one case and two chats (5+2+2=9) at the same time. Omni-Channel won’t assign more work than the rep’s total capacity. Rep capacity enables reps to deliver high-quality customer service without getting overloaded.
Know When Reps Are Available for Work
Rep availability looks at the rep’s presence status in the Omni-Channel utility. The presence status indicates whether the rep is able to take on more work on a given service channel. Presence status is like your availability indicator on a messaging app or web chat app. If you’re busy, away at lunch, or offline, then Omni-Channel won’t assign work to you. Omni-Channel assigns work only to reps whose presence status is Available for a given service channel.
With Omni-Channel, reps no longer have to choose work assignments manually from a queue, which saves everyone time, effort, and brainpower. Because it’s easier for reps to work on their assignments, they can assist customers faster and more effectively and close assignments more quickly.
Set Up Queue-Based Routing
Now that Maria knows more about queue-based routing, she’s ready to try it out for Ursa Major Solar. Maria logs in to Salesforce Lightning Experience and navigates to Salesforce Go to quickly set the features up. She discovers that there’s a Case Routing guided setup flow that walks her through setting up queue-based routing. Sweet!
- In the top right corner, select Setup
, then select Salesforce Go.
- In the search bar, search for and select Case Routing.
- Select Get Started.
- Turn on Case Routing by selecting the Turn On button.
With Omni-Channel now enabled, Maria is all set to create a queue for high priority cases so that all urgent work can be assigned to the available reps automatically. To do this, she begins by checking if she has the right permissions in place.
- From Setup
, in the Quick Find box, search for and select Users.
- Select your name in the user list.
- Under Permission Set Assignments, select Edit Assignments.
- Select Service Cloud User, and add it to the Enabled Permission Sets list.
- Save your changes.
With the permissions in order, all that’s left to do is to create both a brand new queue and the routing logic that will define how work gets assigned to the members of this queue. Let’s see how Maria does this.
- From Setup
, in the Quick Find box, search for and select Routing Configurations.
- Select New.
- For Routing Configuration Name, enter
High-Priority Cases.
- For Routing Priority, enter
1. The priority determines which work records are assigned to reps and in which order.
- For Routing Model, select Least Active. This means that every new work item will go to the rep with the least amount of open work.
- Lastly, define how much of a rep’s capacity one work item requires. To do this, enter
5in the Units of Capacity for In-Progress Work Items field.
- Save your changes.
- In the Quick Find box, search for and select Queues.
- Select New.
- For Label, enter
High-Priority Cases.
- Use the lookup button in the Routing Configuration field to search for and select the High_Priority_Cases configuration created earlier.
- Select Case, and add it to the Selected Objects list.
- Select your name under the Available Members list, and add it to the Selected Members list.
- Save your changes.
Queue-based routing is now up and running for Ursa Major Solar. By enabling Omni-Channel, configuring permissions and routing rules, and building a high-priority queue, Maria has automated passing urgent cases to the right reps. No more manual assignment, no more guesswork.
That's a big win for the support team, but there's more to explore. Queue-based routing works great for assigning work by availability and capacity, but sometimes you need to match cases to reps based on what they actually know. In the next unit, find out how skill-based routing takes things one step further.
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