Skills-based DialingSkills-based Dialing

The term skills-based routing entered the contact center lexicon some 10 years ago. In June, as part of its announcement of release 3.0 of Interaction Dialer, Interactive Intelligence coined a new term, skills-based dialing. Understanding what the term means and if the capability was unique to Interactive Intelligence required discussions with both Interactive Intelligence and some key competitors.

The term skills-based routing entered the contact center lexicon some 10 years ago. In June, as part of its announcement of release 3.0 of Interaction Dialer, Interactive Intelligence coined a new term, skills-based dialing. Understanding what the term means and if the capability was unique to Interactive Intelligence required discussions with both Interactive Intelligence and some key competitors.Skills-based routing refers to a call distribution strategy used in call centers to assign incoming calls to the most suitable agent. This would be in contrast to the traditional ACD method, where calls are sent to the next available agent in a group, such as the sales group. Skills-based routing evaluates in real-time the skills of the available agent, the skills required to handle the inbound query and matches the call to the most appropriate agent.

So what then is skills-based dialing? First it makes sense to define the scenario that the functionality was designed to address. Blended organizations (inbound/outbound) can use a dialer combined with automatic call distribution (ACD) to route callers to the best available agent based on skill-set.

However designing campaign lists for sub-sets of agents with certain skills is inefficient. Classic queuing theory tells us that a single large group of agents is more efficient at handling calls than several smaller groups. The use of skill groups can result in excessive abandon rates and poor customer service.

According to Interactive Intelligence, skills-based dialing addresses these issues by sub-selecting in advance and in real-time only those contacts in a call list that can be handled by available agents. The use of a sub-set of agents is critical to many outbound campaigns, such as those involving lenders and insurers that must be licensed in the states into which they are selling, or for campaigns in which only certain agents are trained to handle certain products. Language-specific campaigns are another good use of agent sub-sets.

It's the real-time aspect of this that I found most intriguing. As explained by Interactive Intelligence's dialer product manager Matt Taylor, imagine that a campaign requires Spanish and English speakers. At 10:00 am, there might be 2 Spanish-skilled agents and 18 English. Based on that, Interaction Dialer would dial 9 times as many English numbers as Spanish to keep the agent pool busy, a 10/90 ratio. If at 10:15 am 3 more Spanish-skilled agents signed on and 3 English went on break, the dialing proportion would change to just 3 times as many English calls - still 20 agents, but a 25/75 ratio.

Interactive Intelligence is not claiming they are the first to offer this capability but it is also not universal. Aspect Software, for example, explained that while they believe their Unified IP solution can match this functionality (if perhaps not in exactly the same way), one of their older so-called Signature Solutions, the Conversations dialer from the Melita acquisition, does not.

So while Interactive Intelligence may not be the first to offer the functionality, they are the first to coin the term skills-based dialing and raise awareness of its usefulness.