How to Use Salesforce Omni-Channel Routing to Automate Your Case Assignments

If you’re running a customer support or call center, you know that getting the right support request to the right agent at the right time can be a real challenge. Support centers receive high volumes of customer requests from a multitude of sources (website forms, incoming emails, customer chats, and phone calls), and of course, what the customer needs can vary widely. Customer SLAs dictate how quickly we need to respond to or resolve the issue, but that relies on the request going to the right person who has the skills to resolve the issue.

Traditionally, case assignments in Salesforce are done with Case Assignment Rules. These are simple automation rules that send Cases either to a holding queue or to individual users based on case criteria. In this workflow, however, agents have to manually review queues and pull work items out for themselves – or supervisors have to manually assign Cases from queues, which is what one of our clients was doing for thousands of Cases per day. Thankfully, there’s a better solution.

Salesforce Omni-Channel Routing takes these traditional queue assignments and supercharges them with automated assignments from queues directly to the right agents. It allows a support agent to log into the routing system and automatically receive cases and work items from the queues they are assigned to – no manual assignment required! It’s smart enough to take into account the agent’s capacity as well as the age and priority of the work item.

Replacing Manual Assignments

For our client, we replaced their manual assignments with the following workflow:

• Incoming work is routed to Queues based on the case type and details.
• Supervisors manage their agents’ queue assignments, assigning agents only to queues they are trained on, ensuring the right agent with the right skill set gets the case.
• Supervisors manage how many cases an agent can handle at a time. Cases are automatically routed when they come in to agents with open capacity to handle the case. If no agents are available, the cases wait in the queue and go to the next agent that becomes available.
• Agents log in to receive work, ensuring they don’t get work when they’re out of the office or on break. Supervisors can easily view who’s online.
• The Salesforce Omni-Channel Supervisor app allows team leads and managers to see their agents with assigned workloads plus the cases waiting to be assigned – all in one view instead of navigating multiple dashboards and reports.

Our client was previously spending hours per day per supervisor, with each supervisor manually reviewing their team’s current assignments and the cases that needed to be assigned. They then manually assigned and balanced the workload across their teams. That entire workflow has been replaced. When we moved 60 agents and 10 supervisors onto Omni-Channel, our client saved over 20 manhours per working day – and they’re more compliant with SLAs since we’ve removed the opportunity for human error to have cases fall through the cracks.

Other Salesforce Omni-Channel Routing Use Cases

Of course, this is just one example of Omni-Channel routing. Omni-Channel can also route real-time items like incoming chats or phone calls, or even incoming leads. This works seamlessly with other work item routing, allowing agents to manage multiple incoming channels. It also allows for skill-based routing, where agents and work items are assigned to Skills that are then matched up to perform the routing.

If your support team struggles to quickly resolve cases because they go to the wrong agent or don’t get assigned in a timely manner, we can help. Soliant Consulting provides Service Cloud implementation services as well as specific Omni-Channel consultations.