Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service – Part-1 – Unified Routing

I have worked on many enterprise projects that requires an engine to intelligently route work related records to their destination. This is especially true for Customer Service where in the incoming work must be routed to Agents. The understanding and design of Work routing is crucial for the ability of the organization to scale as the workload increases due to addition of new work items / customers and service transactions. 

 Now in the world of Omnichannel the work item can be part of any channel – for example SMS Text, Voice, Whatsapp, Chat or Email. There are more complex rules for Routing the right work item to the right Agent without delays. Workers need to be skilled to perform the work and they could be specialized in only certain type of work. Additionally, the Customer Service systems has to support multiple languages too. 

Thankfully we have the Unified Routing engine in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service that can help us in configuring most of the business rules. This blog introduces some of the benefits of implementing Unified Routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service. 

What is Unified Routing? 

 As per Microsoft – “Unified routing is an intelligent, scalable, and enterprise-grade routing and assignment capability. It can direct the incoming work item to the best-suited queue and agent by adhering to work item requirements and matching them with the agent's capabilities.” Unified Routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service works as shown in the following figure.

Unified Routing - Omnichannel for Customer Service

The following is a brief overview of the Unified Routing process in Dynamics 365.

Work Creation – Work item can be originated and ingested from Customers via any channel. This can be Voice, SMS Text, Social like Facebook or Twitter, Chat or Email. This work item gets created as a record in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and is part of the Channel Workstream in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service. The following is a list of Channels that can be created.

Channels in Omnichannel for Customer Service

Work classification – The first step that Unified Routing does is to classify the work item. The classification can be based on the Customer category (Silver, Gold), Urgency (SLA), Skills required, Language etc. Machine Learning models can be created and applied to classify the work item (I will be writing about this in a future blog). Classification is an important task to be able to better understand the work item characteristics and assign to the specific queue that match the same.

Work Assignment – Once the work is classified the next step is to assign the work to the right Queue and Agent within the Queue. During the assignment stage, the work items are assigned to the appropriate queue. You may have separate queue based on the Customer category (Silver/ Gold) or the type of work (Request for information, transaction issue, returns) etc.

Once the items is assigned to a Queue the item is prioritized. This makes sure that the Agents are assigned the high priority item first. Then the work item is assigned to the agents based on the work characteristics, agent skills and capability, and the current state of the agent workforce in terms of availability and workload.

The benefits of using Unified Routing are

1. Matching Customers with the right Agents for first time resolution

2. Classification of work items using Machine learning models

3. Work item prioritization within a queue

4. Work item assignments based on Agent capacity, presence and skills

The Unified Routing process helps in managing Customer Service workload for the organization. There are many set-up and configuration requirements to ensure that the Unified Routing works and is configured for the business process as applicable for the organization.

I will write more about configuring and enabling Unified Routing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service in my future blogs. Thank you for reading.

Mihir Shah I @mihircrm I 365WithoutCode