Routing
Routing is the set of rules deciding which queue or which person each incoming conversation goes to: by detected language, by customer plan, by words in the message or by team workload. It replaces somebody distributing by hand.
What is routing?
Routing is the set of rules deciding which queue or which person each incoming conversation goes to: by detected language, by customer plan, by words in the message or by team workload. It replaces somebody distributing by hand.
Also: auto-assignment · triage rules
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
Because manual distribution collapses exactly when it is needed most: on high-volume days. And because a conversation that takes two hours to reach whoever can resolve it has already spent half the customer patience before anybody reads it.
Routing in detail
Start with the objective criteria
Language and customer plan are criteria that do not fail and that resolve from a field. Routing by message content is more ambitious and gets it wrong more often, so it is worth leaving until the basics work.
By workload or by continuity
Assigning to whoever has least open balances the load but breaks continuity: a returning customer ends up with somebody else and repeats their story. Routing first to whoever handled them before, and by workload only if that person is away, usually works better.
The rule that should not be there
There is nearly always an old rule nobody remembers creating that sends conversations to a dead queue. Reviewing the rules once a quarter is half an hour that saves finding out through a complaint.
Questions about routing
Is it worth routing by what the message says?
Once the objective criteria are covered, yes, and with AI it works considerably better than with keywords. Measure the accuracy before trusting it: routing that is wrong 20% of the time creates more work than it saves.
What happens to whatever fits no rule?
It has to go to a queue with an owner, not into limbo. The queue of things that fit nowhere is what reveals which rules are missing, so it is worth watching rather than hiding.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Support queue
A queue is a set of conversations waiting to be handled by one specific group of people. Splitting the inbox into several queues — by channel, by language, by product or by customer type — is the usual way of dividing the work once a single list stops working.
Escalation
Escalation is handing a conversation to somebody with more knowledge or more permissions to resolve it. It can go from one support tier to another, from an automated agent to a person, or from support to engineering — and in every case whoever receives it has not seen the case until that moment.
Front line
The front line is whoever receives conversations before anybody else: they resolve what is documented, gather the missing information and pass on what they cannot close. It is the filter that decides what reaches the rest of the team and in what state.
SLA — Service level agreement
A service level agreement is the written commitment to respond within set deadlines. It fixes maximum times — usually first response and resolution — defines the hours in which they count, and normally states what happens when they are missed.
Support tiers
Support tiers are the usual way of splitting questions by what it takes to resolve them. Tier 1 handles the known and documented, tier 2 what requires technical knowledge of the product, and tier 3 what ends up with whoever wrote the code.
Overflow
Overflow is what happens when more conversations come in than the team can handle within its usual window. It is not a one-off failure: it is a state, and it usually lasts days, because what goes unanswered today piles on top of tomorrow.
