What is ticket routing?

Why it matters

Routing errors are expensive and quiet. A misrouted ticket does not raise an alarm, it just sits in the wrong queue until someone notices and transfers it, by which point the customer has waited, the SLA clock has run, and the resolution now requires two people instead of one.

What to know

• Round robin balances workload and ignores skill, which is fine for homogeneous queues and poor for specialised ones.
• Skills-based routing matches capability but can starve specialists or create single points of failure.
• Routing on customer tier is where most commercial value sits, and it is the rule teams most often forget.
• Measure transfer rate. A high transfer rate is a routing problem being paid for in agent time.
• Low-confidence classifications should route to a triage queue rather than guessing at a specialist.

An example

Example: a billing question routed to the technical queue waits four hours, is transferred, and waits again. The customer experienced an eight-hour response time on a question that takes ninety seconds to answer, and no metric flagged anything wrong.

Common mistakes

• Routing on keywords that stopped matching how customers write
• Never measuring transfer rate, which is the routing error rate
• Building routing around internal team structure rather than customer need
• Assigning low-confidence tickets to a specialist rather than to triage

Questions