Simon runs a contact centre. Right now, one of his customers has been on hold for 12 minutes. It’s a straightforward billing query wrong amount charged, needs a refund processed. Should take five minutes, tops.
Simon’s system knows exactly who should handle this. Sarah on the billing team is available. She’s handled 200 of these calls this month. She could do it in her sleep.
But Sarah’s not getting the call.
Instead, it’s being routed to Marcus, one of Simon’s most experienced agents, tagged with billing and technical support and escalations. The algorithm sees “billing query” and “Marcus has billing skills” and decides he’s the perfect match. Never mind that he’s already working on a complex technical issue with three calls backed up. Never mind that Sarah’s sitting there, ready and waiting.
By the time Marcus picks up, the customer has been waiting 18 minutes. Marcus rushes through it because he’s got a queue building. The customer’s fuming. Marcus is stressed. And Sarah’s checking her phone wondering why call volumes are so quiet today.
You’ve invested in skills-based routing. You’ve tagged your agents with the right credentials. You’ve built the queues. The system knows who speaks French, who handles billing and who’s trained on technical support.
In practice, your best agents are flat out whilst others sit there twiddling their thumbs. Customers with straightforward questions are stuck in queue hell. Your high-value clients are being routed to whoever’s free, not who’s right. And your top performers are burning out because the algorithm has turned them into the dumping ground for everything difficult.
Here’s the problem: you’ve got the right skills. But you’re routing to the wrong people.
The all-star trap
This is where most routing falls apart. You create a specialist queue and assign only your top performers to it. Makes sense, right? Send the hard stuff to the people who can handle it.
Except now those agents are chocker. Every tricky case drops on the same five people because they’re the only ones tagged with that skill. Meanwhile, perfectly capable agents who could handle seventy percent of those calls are answering password resets. Your stars burn out. Your bench goes cold. The queue backs up.
Over-specialisation creates bottlenecks
The more you slice your queues, the smaller your available pool becomes. You’ve got French-speaking technical support specialists. Great. But when three French customers call at once, two are waiting even though you’ve got twenty agents sitting available in other queues.
Rigid categorisation means complex calls get routed to swamped senior agents, whilst medium-skilled agents who could resolve it faster are watching paint dry.
Availability is a common culprit
Your routing logic assumes agents are available when they’re logged in. But they’re not. They’re in training. They’re on break. They’re finishing notes from the last call. They’ve just dealt with an abusive customer and need five minutes to reset.
The system doesn’t know this. It sees “logged in” and routes the call. The customer waits. The agent isn’t active.
Then there’s turnover. When your multilingual specialist leaves, their skills vanish from the routing system. High-priority calls from French-speaking customers bounce around because nobody redistributed that capability. You get the picture.
You’re managing the algorithm, not the outcome
Most routing failures happen because nobody’s focused on managing the routing. It gets configured once, then left to run. The reality is businesses change, products change and customer needs certainly change. But the routing rules stay the same.
There’s no one monitoring whether the logic still makes sense. No one checks if priority rules are sending low-value work ahead of high-value customers. No one is looking at whether agents tagged with ten skills are really good at all ten or just stretched too thin to excel at any.
Let your agents do their best work
Routing is about the work that happens during contact.
Five human skills matter in that moment: judgment (knowing what this customer really needs), empathy (connecting with how they feel), problem-solving (figuring out what will fix it), communication (explaining it clearly), and adaptability (shifting approach when needed).
When you route based purely on technical skills (“can handle billing queries”), you ignore whether this particular agent has the patience for anxious customers, the problem-solving style for tough calls, or the communication pace this customer needs. You get technically correct matches that feel fundamentally wrong.
The upshot
When you route based on who agents are, not just what they can do, the numbers don’t lie:
First contact resolution jumps because the right match means fewer escalations and callbacks. That’s the difference between 65% FCR and 82% FCR.
Agent retention improves because people aren’t struggling through work that drains them. Your turnover drops because agents feel trusted to do what they’re good at.
Customer satisfaction lifts without sacrificing speed. The match fits, so resolution happens faster. Customers get the right person first time.
Your top performers stop burning out. Workload spreads more evenly instead of funneling every difficult case to the same five people.
Start with outcomes, not technology
If you’re serious about this, you don’t start by reconfiguring your routing engine. You start by deciding what outcomes matter: Resolution? Experience? Retention? Handle time?
Then you look at the people: Who’s best in which situations? Which agents are naturally patient with anxious customers? Who’s brilliant at complex problem-solving but terrible at hand-holding?
This requires someone whose job is to manage the routing logic, update skill assignments as people develop, and rebalance workload when the algorithm creates bottlenecks.
Most importantly, it requires you to stop treating agents as interchangeable spare parts and start routing based on who they are, not just what they can do.
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