Routing and Escalation

New service / support cases are traditionally created by one of three sources: an inbound phone call, an inbound email, or a customer portal website. Onyx can support each of these three solutions, along with the routing and escalation rules and reporting that are required to manage a support organization.

Inbound interactions are managed in one of the following ways:

Phone Calls

Inbound calls can be handled in one of three ways.

• Manually - Users can manually log the calls in the system. This would require searching for the customer's record, adding or updating their contact information, reviewing existing incidents and qualifications for support (do they have an active contract), and then opening or editing a support ticket.
• Scripting - Onyx provides a wizard user interface tool called call scripting that can be used to develop a new support call script that would walk the user through the manual steps above in an automated script.
• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) - Additionally, with CTI, phone numbers and other identification information can be passed into Onyx where a search can be automatically performed. If a corresponding record is found, the Onyx can pop up the support call script or the customer record; if a record is not found, Onyx can pop up a search script, or the search screen.

Emails

Onyx Processing Server (OPS, different from Onyx Process Manager, OPM) provides integration between Onyx and Email. There are three components.

• Email Monitoring - OPS can monitor multiple email mailboxes for new messages from clients (e.g. support@company.com) and can automatically import these emails and attachments into Onyx, and associate the email with both a customer record (creating a new one if one does not exist) and a new service or support incident.
• Email Archiving - Emails sent directly to an employee can be copied to Onyx using the Save in Onyx toolbar in Outlook or Notes. This function stores a copy of the message and attachments as an email in Onyx, and automatically links the email to any contacts' records in CRM with an email address that matches the email From, To, CC, or BCC fields.
• Onyx Email - Users can send emails to customers from within Onyx. Once an email is sent from Onyx, it is tagged with a tracking identification code; email replies from the customer are tracked by Onyx, automatically appended to the email thread, and linked to the corresponding contact and/or incident records.

Customer Portal

The Onyx Customer Portal enables customers to log their own service and support incidents, or to review their existing incidents. When a new issue is logged, an internal rep is notified or the incident is assigned to a queue. When the rep updates the incident, the customer is informed of the update via email and is directed to the customer portal to review the incident.

Call Routing

Once the incident has been logged in Onyx, the next step is to have the incident assigned to the specific person or queue. There are several criterion that are typically used for the call assignment, including: account status (gold, silver, bronze or enterprise accounts), product, type of issue (technical vs. billing), etc. This information can be provided to CRM in a variety of ways: (1) through the phone switch, when coupled with Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR); through a customer portal, when a user selects their product and type of issue; or manually, when a rep answers a phone or an email. If the data is provided in an automated fashion, workflow can be built to assign the issue to the correct user or queue for review either directly, via round robin (tickets are distributed equally across reps), or based on workload (the rep with the least open tickets get the assignment). More complex assignment rules can take work hours, vacation, holidays, and other criteria into account; Onyx Process Manager (business workflow) provides functions to build these complex rules.

Escalations

Once the ticket is assigned, a virtual timer should start against a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to ensure that the issue is handled in a timely manner. For example, calls from enterprise customers may have a 2 hour response time 24 hours a day, where calls from a standard customer my have a 6 hour response time during normal business hours.

• A typical escalation model works as follows:
• The ticket / incident is logged in CRM. The timer starts once the incident is either logged or assigned to an individual or a queue.
• If the incident has not been opened in a specific amount of time (e.g. 2 hours), it may get assigned to another rep on the same team, with notifications to the rep and the manager.
• If the incident has not been resolved in a second amount of time (e.g. 4-6 hours), then the incident could be automatically reassigned to a second tier support team, with notifications going to the support manager and the individual reps assigned to the ticket.
• From there, the manager and the tier 2 team could receive notifications every so many minutes (e.g. every 2 hours) until the issue is resolved.

Escalation business rules can be developed using the Onyx Process Manager, and, like call routing, can include consideration for work hours, vacation, holidays, in addition to criteria for specific service level agreements with specific customers or classes of service.

Reports

The last part of the support case routing and escalation process is reporting. There are a number of reports that are typically used by support managers for evaluating the effectiveness of their staff.

Team Performance

• Ratio of issues resolved on the first contact.
• Calls by Team over a time period (last month)

Individual Performance

• Calls by Rep over a time period (last month)
• Number of calls per rep, and their current status (open, closed, pending)
• Escalations by rep

Product Analysis

• Types of issues by product
• Resolutions by product over a time period (last month)
• Issues by product over a time period
• Escalations by product, issue type, resolution, etc.