During some quiet time today I did some research on Skills Based Routing.
This is a concept firmly understood and adopted in Call center/Telephony environments, and is done in ITSM, but sometimes in a non-systematic way.
The basic concept is that calls are routed to the "most suitable" recipient - based on different criteria. Call Centers used to balance incoming calls on a round-robin approach (you wait for the next available person) and as we painfully know, now subject callers to endless automated questions to get them to the right department. Or perhaps send them in circles until they give up.
ITSM tools can take the best from this practice (and hopefully not the features that really annoy users) to get Incident records to the right recipient.
I'm sure customers already today have their own informal rules for Incident assignment. "Bob knows most about Linux - lets give this Incident to him", "Sharon is on holiday today, lets not assign this Incident to her"
Today in ServiceNow we have Assignment Rules that help Incident records get to the right location. The example below says that if the Category of an Incident is Network then assign it to the Network group. All nice and easy, but we could be cleverer with this.
On an Incident field we have a number of fields that help us determine the best destination for a record. Location, CI, Category and Caller.
There are a number of signals that we could use to determine the best recipient of the record.
- Who has the appropriate skill to handle the issue
- Who is in the correct location if a physical presence is required
- Who has the least load (determined by number of outstanding work maybe?)
- Who is available based either on a working day rota, or if the priority is high enough, who is active RIGHT NOW
- Who has dealt with this type of Incident before
We could also consider which routing algorithm to use
- Round Robin: Give it to whoevers turn it is
- Workload Balancing: Give it to the least loaded person
- Relationship continuity: Give it to someone who normally deals with this customer
- Previous success rate: Give it to someone who is likely to fix the issue quickly
Do you have any other ideas on how we could achieve Skills Based Routing, or any experience to share?
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