ACD technology: Beyond next available agent

Telemarketing, Jun 1995 by Herel, Charles

The traditional objective of ACD (automatic call distribution) technology is to route calls based on idle-agent queuing with the intent to even out the workload among agents. The system must know which agent has been idle the longest. The implicit assumptions in this system are first that all calls were for the same basic purpose and second that all agents are equally qualified to handle the call. Designed in the days when employers were most concerned about the number of calls answered, the goal was to minimize agent idle time and answer an ever-increasing volume of calls.

More Recent Developments

As the role of the call center has expanded over the past five years, complex transactions such as customer support for technical products, the selling of stocks and bonds, or insurance have come to be handled by call centers. Agents now have specialized knowledge, and call centers must route calls to agents with very different skills. The "next available agent" algorithm does not work well in is environment because the next available agent may not have the securities or operating system knowledge to satisfy the caller's request.

ACD vendors have responded by extending existing routing algorithms with a number of logical enhancements. These include overflow groups, queuing to multiple ACD splits or groups, routing to specific agents, and allowing agents to be logical members of more than one group. Through some good marketing by the vendors, these extensions to the classical "next available agent" algorithms have become known as "skills-based routing."

The intent is to broaden the pool of agents available to service a call by allowing agents to take calls on their secondary or tertiary skills if there are no calls for their primary skill. A limited number of skill choices necessitates call center managers to "group by skills," which often means forcing skills into broader skill categories. For instance, instead of defining the knowledge of each of several computer operating systems -- DOS, Windows, OS/2, and UNIX -- as its own skill, a software-limited call center manager might group all these skills into one undifferentiated skill, "Operating Systems."

"Skills-based routing" attempts to recognize the fact that all agent capabilities are different. In technical support areas, agent skills range from a novice to the expert with years of experience. Call center managers must respond to the need to improve customer service, while recognizing that the costs of training agents is very high. Perhaps a more useful software metaphor is the resume, one that could uniquely describe each agent's skill and experience level.

Skills-Based Routing

Current solutions from ACD vendors allow managers to customize call control tables that determine the call path. This approach works with a limited number of skills, but has a number of drawbacks as the number of skills grows larger. A major problem is that these tables are cumbersome to administer and maintain, and though flexible, are not intuitive or easy to troubleshoot.

While these modifications may expand the pool of agents available to service a particular set of calls, the real answer is to further refine call routing software so it can better distinguish among call center agents, choosing the right agents for the caller's requirements. Call centers need ACD software with the intelligence to choose the appropriately skilled agent. Smarter software would select among agent resumes, pick the agent best suited for the call, and put the call on a queue for that agent.

Improvements Needed

As the trend toward complexity continues and call center agents become more specialized, the need for improvements in skills-based routing becomes acute. The next advancements in routing software will accommodate a large number of skills and allow an intuitive rating of those skills for proficiency and call preference.

Charles Herel is manager for call center requirements within the Product Management group at Siemens Rolm Communications in Santa Clara, California. He has primary responsibility for identifying market requirements and defining future product functionality. Previous to his current position, Mr. Herel was an advisory sales engineer focusing on call center applications. Before coming to Siemens Rolm, Herel was an applications programmer at IBM.