Enterprise-level service desks are complex, high pressure environments, where the delivery of an exceptional customer experience is an absolute pre-requisite. Time is money, so how can global organisations enable service desk automation, to ensure that the right case is routed to the right agent, in the right place, at the right time – every time?
The Challenges
How to manage multiple service desks in multiple locations? It’s not always obvious where a case should be routed once it’s raised. A simple English language case can be just as easily processed in New York, Mumbai or Sydney, as it can in London. So, where should the case be routed to facilitate the shortest possible time-to-resolution?
How to handle numerous different languages within each region? Cases are being raised in multiple languages and It doesn’t necessarily follow that a case should be routed to the country of origin. We might have Spanish-speaking agents in Mexico, Argentina or Spain, and the most appropriate agent for that case could be based in any one of those locations. Which is the smartest destination for each case.
How to manage hundreds of agents and thousands of cases every day? These are large-scale operations. Hundreds of customer support agents might be processing tens of thousands of cases every day. At this scale, how is it possible to route the right case to the right agent in near-time?
Which agents are physically able to take a case at any given time? Agent availability is a critical factor. The best agent for the job might not be available. They might be engaged on an existing case, they might have reached their quota for the day, they might be out for lunch or indeed they might be off sick. The availability of each agent needs to be factored in when it comes to determining how a case should be routed.
Which agents have the capacity to take another case? Likewise, workload needs to be considered. If an agent has a load of existing cases to work through, some of which might be quite complex, then there’s no point in assigning them another case, even if it’s in their area of expertise, and especially if the case in question is time-sensitive.
Who is just starting their shift and who is about to finish? We also need to think about shift patterns. If a case is raised in London at 5.15pm, does it make sense to route that case to a London-based support team whose shift is due to end in 15 minutes? Or should we instead route it to San Francisco, where a new shift is just beginning?
Just how quickly does each case need to be processed? Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, really complicate matters. SLA-bound cases are urgent. Not only do they need to be routed to the best available agent, that agent also needs to be available for a fixed number of minutes or hours in order to process and close down the case as quickly as possible. If it’s a complex and time-sensitive case, it might need to be relayed from one agent to another, and then maybe to yet another, in order to get the case fully processed and resolved within an 8, 12 or 24 hour window.
How to manage cases coming from email, phone and chat simultaneously? Increasingly, customers are using social media as a means of raising cases with vendors and suppliers. Raising a case on Twitter, or via chat, are now the norm. But how does a global company manage to assign and process so many different cases coming from so many different sources? Is it possible to have a common set of assignment rules?
How to manage hundreds or even thousands of assignment rules? Legacy case management systems in Salesforce are often highly dependent on hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of hard-coded assignment rules. A new rule is often required for each new agent, and those rules need to be maintained, amended or deleted continuously, as the business grows. That’s a challenge, and a not insignificant overhead.
FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Q-assign is available on a free 30-day trial from the AppExchange.
- Automatically route cases to best agent
- Manage time-zones & shift patterns
- Prioritize SLA-bound cases
- Load-balancing, quotas & caps
- Weighted assignment & point-scoring
- Territory Assignment
- Real-time agent availability
- 100% native to Salesforce
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The Solution
Q-assign is an intelligent case management app which is native to the Salesforce platform. It can scan every case as it comes into the business to determine its nature and complexity and then matches it to the best available agent based on their skills, capabilities, location, workload and availability.