Ticket routing · Routing of customer questions
What is ticket routing and how do you distribute questions well?
Ticket routing determines which question lands with which agent. Set up poorly, it costs you the first twenty minutes of every morning.
In short
Ticket routing is assigning incoming customer questions to the right agent or team, based on rules about topic, channel, language, customer type or urgency. The aim is for a question to land with someone who can handle it without intervention, instead of sitting in a shared queue until someone picks it up.
Distribute on availability or on topic?
Distributing on availability keeps the queue empty but sends the return question just as readily to someone who doesn't know the return policy. Distributing on topic yields better answers and the risk that a specialist is ill and their pile stays put.
In practice a combination works: assign on topic with a fallback rule putting the question into the general queue after a set time or on absence. Without that fallback, topic-based assignment is a way to let work sit.
What a good rule uses as input
Rules based on keywords in the subject line break as soon as a customer uses different words. "Where is my parcel" and "still nothing received" are about the same thing and share no keyword at all.
Stronger rules look at the intent of the message and at what's known about the customer: do they have an open order, are they a business account, is there an ongoing complaint. Those details change the urgency more often than the text itself.
Where it goes wrong
Everything into one general queue
A single queue looks fair and in practice means someone sorts first thing every morning. That sorting time is work that helps no customer and comes back every day.
Rules nobody remembers
After a year there are often twenty rules, half of them from a situation that no longer exists. Put a date and a reason with them, and review them once a quarter.
Is your routing still working?
There's a rule nobody can explain
Rules pile up and nobody removes them. Walk the list every six months and delete what you can't justify.
One queue is watched by one person
That's not routing but a dependency. Always put a second pair of eyes on it.
Conversations are often handed back
Then you're distributing on something that doesn't match who can do the work. The reasons given on handback point at the error.
The customer picks their own category
A dropdown on your contact form distributes on what the customer thinks their question is. Check how often that's right.
What to do this week
Measure how long it takes before an incoming question has an owner. If that's structurally over half an hour, you're doing that assignment by hand and it's your first automation step. Start with the two biggest topics, not with every rule at once.
What this looks like in a system
In Cuego topic, language and urgency are determined on arrival from the content of the message and the connected customer data, not just keywords. A question about an open order from a business customer can therefore take a different route than the same text from a new visitor. If an assigned ticket sits idle, it falls back into the queue.
Cuego AIRelated terms
Queue
A queue is the list of conversations waiting on someone. How you sort that list determines which customers you systematically help too late.
Read onWorkflow
A workflow is a sequence of steps that runs by itself once something happens. The skill is choosing which steps deserve it.
Read onEscalation
Escalating is handing a conversation to someone who's allowed more or knows more. The rules for it are usually written nowhere, and you notice that only in the conversations that go wrong.
Read on