Chat Routing

Customers are always on the move and they expect prompt, personalized support. With enhanced routing policy you can customer engagement more efficient and effective.

What is a Routing Policy?

A routing policy is a set of rules that determines how incoming customer chats are assigned or “routed” to available agents. These policies allow businesses to prioritize certain types of inquiries, match specific agents to specific needs, and distribute workload evenly. Routing policies enhance both customer experience and operational efficiency, making them a core component of any robust live chat solution.

Routing policies can vary significantly based on business goals, the type of customer inquiries, and the resources available. Here are some common routing methods:

• Round Robin Routing: Distributes chats in sequence among available agents, ensuring an even workload.
• Skill-Based Routing: Matches customers with agents who have the specific skills needed, such as language fluency or product expertise.
• Priority-Based Routing: Directs high-priority customers to specific agents, ensuring VIPs receive dedicated support.
• Agent Availability Routing: Assigns chats based on agents’ availability statuses, ensuring that only those ready to respond receive chats.

These and other routing techniques create a tailored, responsive support system that benefits both customers and agents.

Key Benefits of a Routing Policy

1. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Quick, accurate routing reduces wait times and connects customers to knowledgeable agents.
2. Balanced Agent Workload: Distributes chats evenly, reducing agent burnout.
3. Improved Efficiency: Reduces wait times and minimizes transfers by matching the right agent to each query.
4. Better Resource Allocation: Ensures that specialized queries go to qualified agents, optimizing support resources.
5. Scalability: A structured routing policy supports increased chat volume as businesses grow.

In REVE chat we have 3 main routing policies. Broadcasting, Time Based Routing & Priority Based Routing to evenly distribute messaged among your agents. Let’s dive deeper into each section.

To open the routing policy, navigate to Settings> Routing Policy. From there users can change their routing logic for their live chat requests.

Broadcasting

In this routing policy, when a new visitor arrives, a chat request will be sent to all online agents. The chat will land in the que section of the chat panel. From there any agent can accept the request and it will be removed from queued. In broadcasting the chat acceptance time doesn’t play any role. So, agents are not bound to accept chat within a specific time frame, rather they will accept as soon as they finish one request.

Auto Chat Assign (Time Based Routing)

In this routing policy, chat request from a visitor will land to the agent with the most free slots. The routing decision is made based on the current workload of the agents, considering the percentage of their concurrent chat capacity in use.

Suppose agent A has a concurrent chat number of 20 and he is currently serving 10 customers. Another agent B has a concurrent chat number of 10 and he is serving only 4 customers currently. Then when a new visitor arrives the chat request will land to agent B. Agent A is occupied with 50% of their concurrent chat capacity (10 out of 20), while Agent B is handling 40% of their capacity (4 out of 10). Since Agent B is serving customers below their maximum capacity, the new chat request is directed to them, optimizing efficiency and balancing workload.

But if both agents were at 50% of their capacity, a new chat request will land to the agent with the highest concurrent chat capacity.

After assigning the agent, the agent can see the request in the queued section of the chat panel. He has to accept the chat within the chat acceptance time. Otherwise it will be counted as missed chat.

Priority Based Routing

In this routing policy, chat requests are distributed based on the priority order of departments set in the system. If an agent belongs to multiple departments, and multiple chat requests come in from those departments, the system will refer to the assigned department order (as configured by the admin) to decide which department’s request gets routed to the agent first.

This ensures agents handle higher-priority department chats before others, leading to smarter workload distribution and more efficient support handling.

How to change the department wise prioritisation:

• Simply navigate to Settings> Agent Management> Agents.
• Hover over an active agent and click edit. A pop-up will appear.
• Under Assigned Departments, if there are multiple departments added, by simply dragging a department an admin can rearrange the priority.
• Click Update to save the changes.

Lead Based Routing

Businesses can route a specific visitors chat to a specific agent using lead based routing. Lead based routing is available only for Auto Chat Assign or Priority Based Routing. Simply select any one from these two and a new settings will be available below.

Enable the toggle button and click Save Changes. After enabling this feature a new option will be available in the customer information panel in inbox . If an agent toggels the checkbox, then the visitor will be marked as the agents lead and will always land in the agents inbox panel.

How It Works

• Agents can select the Lead checkbox for a visitor from the Customer Information Panel.
• When selected, the visitor is marked as that agent’s lead.
• All future conversations from this visitor will always be routed to the same agent’s inbox.

An important note: Lead visitors will be assigned to the agent even if the agent has reached their concurrent chat limit..