What is intelligent call routing (ICR)?
Use intelligent call routing (ICR), or skills-based routing, in your queues to match customers with the agents best suited to meet their needs. Available for Core and Complete customers.
A call queue helps you handle incoming calls by placing them in a virtual line or waiting room to be answered by agents assigned to the queue, according to the configured ring strategies. In the meantime, callers hear ringing, hold music, or announcements until the next available agent can answer their call. The
Intelligent Call Routing feature utilizes skill assignments to enhance the customer experience in a queue. Rather than matching up any agent with any caller solely based on the configured ring strategy, you can
assign agents skills that coincide with the
choices you give callers before entering a queue. When an agent that best matches the options a caller selected is available, the caller is sent to that agent. You can also think of it as being paired with an expert on the topics you're calling about rather than just the next available person.
Important: With this feature enabled, a caller might wait longer for an agent with the right skill set to be available to take their call. For example, Joe calls the support phone number, hears the greeting with menu options, selects 1 for English, and then selects 2 for technical help. A few minutes later, Susan calls that same support number, hears the greeting with menu options, selects 1 for English, and then 4 for billing help. If the only agent available in the queue has the English and billing skills assigned to them, the system will dispatch Susan's call to the available agent because that is the optimal match. Even though Joe entered the queue first, he will continue to wait until an agent who speaks English and has the technical help skill is available. If you would like to avoid the possibility of excessive wait times for callers, you can enable the Allow callers to be dispatched when there is no match between caller need and agent skills setting. If this setting is enabled, Joe would be helped by the next available agent, regardless if that agent has the technical help skill that Joe wants.
To use this queue enhancement feature, complete the following:
- Create a queue, select the ICR queue type.
- Assign skills to your agents.
- Add the caller info nodes into your dial plan to match the skills you assigned to your agents.
- Determine if you want the system to dispatch callers to any available agents when there is no agent that matches the requested skills available.
- Ensure the phone number customers call is routed to this enhanced dial plan.