Distribute incoming chats more evenly between operators by adjusting the difficulty factor of a typical chat.
Difficulty balancing helps you control the combination of work items an operator can handle concurrently as well as how soon a chat queue reaches capacity by differentiating difficulty levels between typical incoming chats, based on department of origin, website or chat window.
When difficulty balancing is enabled, Automatic Chat Distribution takes chat difficulty into consideration by assigning a combination of fewer difficult and a greater number of less difficult items to operators until their queue limit has been reached or exceeded.
For example, tech support issues and general business inquiries may require different amount of time to resolve. Administrators can assess and review the difficulty of a chat using any metric of their choosing, such as on-call time or chat lines exchanged. Raising or lowering the difficulty factor can make operators more efficient and lessen visitor wait-time by routing chats that are appropriate to operator skill level, expertise, and workload.
Consider the following examples:
Scenario | Outcome |
---|---|
|
The operator is effectively handling 4 items, and will not receive any more chats as the limit has been reached. |
|
All five chats are assigned to the operator, who is effectively handling 4.5 items. No further chats will be assigned as the limit has already been exceeded. |
The effective weight of a chat in the queue is linearly proportional to its difficulty factor.
By design, difficulty-based distribution can cause an operator's limit to be exceeded. This can temporarily overload an operator; however, the behavior is expected, and aims to prevent difficult items from sitting in the queue for a prolonged period of time to ensure that visitors in the queue are treated fairly.
Difficulty can be applied in two ways:
Chat rule difficulty prevails over department-level difficulty.