Article Feb 16, 2023 3 min read

Why is it essential to offer better customer advisor availability?

Ruta Fridrihsone

Feb 16, 2023 3 min read

Ruta Fridrihsone

Optimize costs, automate agent backup, offer a better customer experience, and increase conversions by making your advisors more available through Agent prioritization.

How to avoid losing leads and limit availability shuffling?

Have you ever experienced a situation where one of your experts was unavailable for an extended period? Was it a tedious task to re-assign the availability of your other experts to serve as a backup?
Did you lose leads due to unavailability?

With Pexip Engage's (previously known as Skedify) newest feature, Agent prioritization, these situations and issues can be dealt with efficiently.

Why use Agent prioritization?

What exactly is Agent prioritization, and when is it relevant? There are several situations where Agent prioritization is used. To illustrate it quickly, we can look at a fictitious example. Suppose you own an insurance company.

There is John, an expert in car insurance for your branch in Brussels. But John is on holiday for two weeks. Usually, if your customers want to book an appointment in your branch in Brussels through Pexip Engage, there would not be any availability for two weeks. Of course, this is not ideal, as you don’t want to leave your car insurance customers hanging for two weeks.

Thanks to the new feature Agent prioritization, you can assign ranks to your agents to offer backup and, therefore, more availability.

In this particular example, you assign John as the expert with Rank 1 for the subject car insurance in your Brussels branch. It means that John will always show availability for this particular subject in this branch if his calendar allows it.
We can also assign his colleague Jane, who is not an expert but is still eligible, to Rank 2.
And assign Nick with Rank 3 as the last backup line if Jane is unavailable.

Priority thresholds to automate backup

We can set a priority threshold in days per rank with Agent prioritization. For this example, let’s say we put a priority threshold of 3 days for Rank 1 and 4 days for Rank 2.

It means that if John is unavailable for more than three days, Jane will be offered to the customer as she is Rank 2, thus the backup.

If John and Jane are unavailable for more than 4 days, Nick will be offered.

Main use cases for Agent prioritization

1. Level of expertise

Agents are ranked (prioritized) based on their level of knowledge or experience.

2. Service cost

When multiple agents with different costs are available (typically internal agents vs. external consultants), you first want to offer internal agents and only external consultants when, internally, nobody is available - as the external agents are only there to fill capacity needs.

3. Lead segments

Companies want to allocate leads to their agents based on lead segments to provide the best service possible to increase customer experience and the likelihood of closing. This allocation is essential, but not at any cost.

If an agent assigned to a particular lead segment is not available soon enough (e.g., holiday), you don’t want the lead to be lost. Therefore, allowing a backup agent to become available if no slots are offered within a specific timeframe would be an ideal solution to guarantee you don’t lose leads and increase conversions.

3 benefits of using Agent prioritization

1. Better consumer experience

Offer the right expert with the highest level of expertise for a specific service (meeting subject).
Offer more available slots with backup agents. Therefore, the customer can find a suitable time quicker and doesn’t have to wait too long.

2. Efficiency gain

The possibility of prioritizing more cost-effective agents (e.g., internal agents vs. external consultants). Automatic backup agents are shown when prioritized agents are unavailable—no manual rearrangement of the agents in your organization.

3. Conversion increase

With more availabilities shown to the customer thanks to Agent prioritization, the likelihood of a customer booking a meeting will increase and, therefore, the conversion. In the past, when agents weren’t available, there would not be any availability.

What’s next?

Thanks to Agent prioritization, you can ensure a meeting will still occur when some of your agents are absent, and you can improve customer experiences and increase conversions.

Keep an eye on this space as we develop new features and tools to help you own the complete customer journey from A to Z.

Are you interested in hearing more?
Contact us to get started.

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