AT&T 555-230-520 manual Emergency Road Service-English-11 Route Planning-English-33

Expert Agent Selection

Spanish callers as well as from callers who speak another language (probably English).

Skills for an application can be illustrated via a table. The following table presents a very abbreviated example of such a skill distribution for an auto club. We will refer back to this table several times in this chapter.

Table 10-4. Example of a Skill Table for an Auto Club

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Emergency Road Service-Bilingual-22	Route Planning-Bilingual-44
Emergency Road Service-English-11	Route Planning-English-33

In this table, five skills are defined. Each skill indicates knowledge or an ability (on the part of the agent) or a need for knowledge (on the part of the caller) vis-a- vis an auto club. One or more of these skills can be attributed to the agent according to the agent’s expertise with the corresponding highway service(s) and his or her language-speaking ability. Similarly, one or more of these skills can be considered ‘‘needs’’ on the part of the caller.

The previous table is arranged in such a manner that the agents at the top level have the broadest knowledge (that is, these agents can handle emergency road service and route planning calls and can speak Spanish). The top level (skill group) here is called ‘‘Supergroup,’’ and it contains agents who, as a group, can take any type of call regarding the auto club. Accordingly, this skill group serves as a ‘‘backup’’ skill group. Asyou descend through the table, each sublevel corresponds to a group of agents who have more specific skills and can therefore take more specialized calls.

Calls can be distributed to the most-idle agent by using either the Uniform Call Distribution (UCD) option or the Expert Agent Distribution (EAD) option. EAD distributes calls from a skill hunt group to agents to whom the relevant skill is assigned as a primary skill before distributing calls to agents to whom the skill is assigned as a secondary skill. Skills assigned to an agent as ‘‘primary’’ indicate a higher level of expertise or preference by the agent than any ‘‘secondary’’ skills assigned to that agent.

Agents are always given a preference for primary skill calls. With EAD optioned, callers are given a preference for primary skill agents. Such preferences provide the best caller—agent m atch. With UCD optioned, calls are sent to the most-idle agent with a primary or secondary skill. This scenario provides a more even distribution to calls and therefore keeps agents equally busy.

Multiple Call Handling on Request (G3V3 and later releases) and Forced Multiple Call Handling (G3V4 and later releases) allow an agent to receive additional ACD

10-6Issue 4 September 1995