Recently I was asked to consider a requirement to route web chats within Omnichannel for Customer Service in a particular way. In this post I explain how I used a combination of Virtual Agents and skills based routing to achieve the requirement.

So the ask was …. to route all chats to a group of first line (or front line) agents.

But if those front line users were busy we’d want anyone available in the second line support term to pick up the chat.

Most of the time chats should be quickly answered with this approach. But what-if we are having a really busy day and all the agents are occupied??? Well then routing to a Virtual Agent might be really useful so that details of the customer query could be captured. The “message” relating to the query should end up as a lead (or other entity) in Dynamics 365. So that this could queued for someone to respond to the customer when time permits.

This was a very complex scenario. But actually one that could be typical of many real-world scenarios.

Just to make things extra complex I wanted to achieve all of this with no code!

In the video below I show how this challenge was answered using skills based routing and a virtual agent within Omnichannel for Customer Service.