Remember Edouard who had a chocolate related problem? Logging a service request is one thing, finding the right service agent to resolve the problem is another one. This post is all about how service request assignment in Engagement Cloud works in Release 12.
Queues
Notice how the service request in the screenshot above was assigned to a queue.
Service Requests are not assigned to queues in the same way other Sales Cloud data is assigned to resources. Territory management is perfect to assign accounts and opportunities based on what type customer or opportunity you want to win, but service request handling requires a different approach:
- The product or industry specialization and their experience level of each individual service agent needs to be taken into account
- The timezone or availability of the agents needs to be considered as you obviously want 24/7 service to your customers
- …
In Engagement Cloud, service requests are managed through queues.
A queue represents a group of resources or a group of teams that can work on a service request.
The queue was not chosen by the person logging the service request though. It got assigned based on service request assignment rules. In the example below I created a queue specific to resolve specifically only typical Belgian problems and assigned myself to the queue. From here on, I can assign myself to any service request that gets assigned to this queue.
Before we can assign service requests to queue, we need to make sure the service requests can be identified with enough detail in order to spread them over the available queues. We need to classify service requests before we can assign them to queues.
Categories
Service request categories are one of the main ways of classifying service requests. Notice how categories can be created in a hierarchy allowing you to classify them on a high level if not a lot of information is available about service requests, or on a very detailed level in case a lot of information about the service request is available
I created a category hierarchy in order to group service requests that deal with typical Belgian problems.
Other classifications can like product or severity can be used to classify service requests too and if that is not enough, it is off course possible to detail service requests further by extending the service request object using App Composer.
Service Request Assignment Rules
With the queue and the categories defined, all that is left to do is assign service request assigned to the categories to the queue using a service request assignment rule.
In the next release of Engagement Cloud, more fine grained assignments can be defined (e.g. direct service agents assignment or real time routing) with the introduction of the Omnichannel framework
