Back in 2021, when Salesforce Omni-Channel was still maturing, we discussed the foundational shift from simple queue-based routing to the more sophisticated skills-based routing. This innovation allowed businesses to move beyond simply assigning work to agents based on availability within a general bucket, instead matching customer inquiries with agents possessing specific expertise. Today, as customer expectations continue to rise and companies embrace broader omnichannel strategies, skills-based routing has evolved significantly, particularly with the introduction of Salesforce Service Cloud Voice and its Unified Routing capabilities.
From Queue to Skill – The evolution of intelligent work distribution
Historically, in contact centers, customer inquiries were primarily managed through a queue-based system. Imagine a customer calling in or sending an email; that request would land in a general queue, say, for “Sales Inquiries” or “Technical Support.” Agents assigned to that queue would then pick up the next available item. This approach works, but it often meant that an agent might receive a query they weren’t best equipped to handle, leading to transfers, delays, and a less than ideal customer experience. Your initial configuration might have involved creating a queue for “English Language Support” and another for “Technical Questions,” and an incoming inquiry would be assigned to only one of these. This limited the flexibility and efficiency of your support team, especially as customer needs became more complex.
The introduction of skills-based routing in Salesforce Omni-Channel marked a significant leap forward for digital channels like email, chat, and WhatsApp. Instead of rigid queues, work items were evaluated based on the specific skills they required – perhaps “French language,” “product knowledge,” or “billing expertise.” Omni-Channel would then intelligently route that work item to the first available agent who possessed all the necessary skills. This brought a new level of precision and personalization to digital interactions, ensuring that customers quickly connected with someone who could truly help them, improving both efficiency and satisfaction. For a long time, however, voice calls, while managed through Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, largely remained bound by the traditional queue-based approach for routing. While the calls appeared in the same Omni-Channel widget for agents, the underlying routing logic for voice was often still dependent on the telecommunication platform, not the skills engine within Salesforce.
Bringing Voice into the Skills-based fold with Unified Routing
The real game-changer for comprehensive skills-based routing across all channels, including voice, arrived with Salesforce’s Unified Routing within Service Cloud Voice. This development finally closes a significant gap, allowing phone calls to benefit from the same intelligent, skills-based distribution that digital channels have enjoyed. For mid-sized organizations, this is particularly impactful, as it means their often leaner support teams can now maximize efficiency by ensuring that every incoming query, regardless of how it arrives, lands with the most qualified agent.
With Unified Routing, a phone call about a technical issue from a German-speaking customer can now be automatically routed to an agent who speaks German and has specific technical product knowledge, without needing to go through a general voice queue first. This capability profoundly enhances the truly omnichannel experience companies strive for. It means your entire customer service operation – whether dealing with emails, web chats, WhatsApp messages, or phone calls – can now leverage a single, sophisticated routing engine. This simplifies management, provides a consistent experience for both customers and agents, and empowers your team to deliver world-class service with greater precision and speed. The benefits are clear: reduced transfer rates, faster resolution times, and a more streamlined agent workflow, all contributing to elevated customer satisfaction and operational cost savings.
Some things to consider when implementing skills-based routing for Voice
While Unified Routing brings immense advantages, particularly for skills-based routing of voice calls, its implementation, especially for multi-national support teams, comes with a few important considerations. Understanding these implications beforehand is crucial for successful deployment and avoiding potential pitfalls.
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One current implication to be aware of is that traditional callback functionality is not natively supported within the Unified Routing model for voice. In queue-based voice systems, customers might have the option to request a callback instead of waiting on hold. As Unified Routing prioritizes pushing interactions to the best-skilled available agent directly, integrating a separate callback mechanism requires careful planning and potentially custom solutions to ensure a seamless customer journey if this is a crucial service offering.
Perhaps the most significant implication, especially for organizations serving customers across multiple countries, revolves around outbound calling. The design philosophy of Unified Routing encourages the use of “one global contact center group” where all incoming interactions, across all channels, are channeled into a single, large queue from which skills-based routing then intelligently distributes them to the most appropriate agent. While this approach is highly efficient for inbound work, it impacts outbound communications. The current configuration dictates that only one default outbound phone number can typically be associated with this overarching global routing profile.
For a mid-sized company supporting customers in various countries, this can present a tangible challenge. Imagine your centralized support team, perhaps located in Belgium, needing to call a customer in Germany. If the default outbound number is a Belgian number or a generic international number, the German customer might receive a call from an unfamiliar or even foreign-looking number. This can lead to customers being hesitant to answer, impacting callback success rates and potentially eroding the perception of local presence and trust. Furthermore, relying solely on international outbound calls from a central location to diverse countries can unexpectedly inflate telecommunication costs, potentially offsetting the operational efficiencies gained on the inbound side. While technical workarounds, such as Amazon Connect’s whisper flow, can sometimes allow the display of a more localized caller ID for specific agent-initiated calls, the inherent limitation within the unified routing profile for general outbound work remains a key point for strategic planning.
Strategic Approaches for Optimized Outbound Dialing
Navigating these intricacies demands a proactive and thoughtful strategy to fully leverage skills-based routing while maintaining localized outbound professionalism and cost efficiency. The goal remains to deliver a highly localized customer experience without sacrificing the efficiency of a centralized support operation.
One effective strategy involves implementing a nuanced approach to outbound dialing. While the single global contact center group excels at simplifying inbound routing across all channels, for outbound calls, organizations may need to provision specific local phone numbers within Amazon Connect for each country or region they support. Agents would then be meticulously trained to dynamically select the appropriate local number when initiating outbound calls to customers in those regions. This often requires custom development or leveraging Amazon Connect’s advanced routing capabilities to present agents with a choice of outbound Caller IDs based on the customer’s geographical location stored in Service Cloud. This ensures that while inbound traffic is managed with peak efficiency through skills-based routing, outbound calls consistently maintain a localized presence, addressing both customer perception and crucial cost concerns for mid-sized budgets.
Another pragmatic approach involves intelligently leveraging other digital channels for outbound communication, especially in situations where a local voice number is not strictly imperative. Proactive customer outreach via channels like email, web chat, or popular messaging applications such as WhatsApp can substantially reduce the reliance on traditional outbound voice calls. These digital channels often inherently support localized sender identities or prominently display the brand name, effectively mitigating the issue of unfamiliar international numbers. Sending a WhatsApp message from a verified business profile or an email from a localized address can be equally effective, and often more preferred by customers, for crucial follow-ups or proactive service communications.
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Furthermore, for organizations with a sufficiently large and geographically dispersed customer base, a “follow the sun” operational model might genuinely offer a holistic solution. While this model traditionally focuses on handing over customer inquiries across different time zones to maintain continuous 24/7 support, it can also be ingeniously adapted to directly address the outbound dialing challenge. By strategically distributing smaller, specialized support teams across key regional hubs, each team can then be provisioned with its own local inbound and dedicated outbound numbers. While this approach slightly diverges from a singular global unified routing profile for all inbound (as it might involve implementing regional unified routing profiles instead), it crucially ensures that all customer interactions—both inbound and outbound—can consistently leverage local phone numbers that are highly relevant to their specific geography. This model inherently aligns call handling with geographical presence, fostering a more authentic local customer experience and expertly circumventing the single outbound number limitation of a strictly centralized global unified group.
Conclusion
The evolution of skills-based routing in Salesforce, culminating in Unified Routing for Service Cloud Voice, represents a significant leap forward in delivering seamless, highly efficient, and intelligent customer support across diverse channels. Its remarkable ability to unify interactions—now including voice calls with advanced skills-based distribution—is invaluable. It empowers support teams to manage their inbound interactions with greater precision and profoundly enhances the customer experience, particularly for companies adept at handling a multitude of languages and diverse local phone numbers.
However, the inherent nuances of a multi-national environment, most notably concerning outbound call origination from a centralized support team, undeniably demand careful strategic planning. The practical limitation of a single default outbound number within a unified global contact center group highlights a crucial trade-off that organizations must actively address to avoid adverse customer perception issues and potentially increased operational costs. Successful implementation of this powerful technology within a global context transcends mere technical deployment; it fundamentally demands a thoughtful, integrated strategy that meticulously balances inbound efficiency with a strong, localized outbound presence. Whether through the intelligent selection of dynamic outbound numbers, the strategic leveraging of versatile digital communication channels, or the consideration of a more distributed operational model, organizations can discover tailored solutions that ensure their customer service remains both highly efficient and deeply personalized. At Omnicloud, we understand that data forms the very core of every successful skills-based routing initiative, and our comprehensive suite of data management services is meticulously designed to help you build an unshakeable data foundation. Ultimately, the paramount goal is to fully embrace the transformative promise of unified service, empowering businesses to genuinely connect with their customers, precisely wherever they are, and however they choose to communicate, allowing their teams to achieve global impact.
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