Hybrid Behavioral Pairing for Contact Center Routing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional contact center assignment methods, such as FIFO and priority queuing, often lead to uneven agent utilization and longer waiting times for lower-priority contacts, failing to maximize overall contact center performance.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a hybrid behavioral pairing system that combines behavioral pairing and performance-based routing strategies to determine a balanced and skewed contact utilization, using a weighted sum of orderings to pair higher-priority contacts more frequently and with a greater number of agents, thereby optimizing agent and contact pairings.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If priority queuing strategy is used to maximize contact center performance, then higher-priority contacts are served faster, but lower-priority contacts experience noticeably longer waiting times
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple ordering strategies (behavioral pairing with balanced utilization and performance-based routing with unbalanced utilization) into a hybrid approach that merges the benefits of both FIFO fairness and priority queuing efficiency, resolving the contradiction between serving high-priority contacts quickly and maintaining acceptable wait times for lower-priority contacts
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts the skew parameter to control the degree of unbalanced contact utilization, allowing flexible modification of the ordering strategy to balance between performance optimization and fairness, thereby addressing the waiting time issue for lower-priority contacts while maintaining overall productivity
2Ease of operation
If traditional FIFO assignment strategy is used, then contacts are assigned in order of arrival, but agent utilization becomes uneven and contact center performance is not maximized
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces dynamic ordering strategies that adaptively reorder contacts based on behavioral pairing and performance metrics, transforming the static FIFO approach into a dynamic system that optimizes agent utilization and contact center performance while maintaining operational simplicity through automated processing
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary ordering layer between contact arrival and agent assignment that applies behavioral pairing and performance-based routing logic, mediating between the simple FIFO input and the optimized assignment output to improve productivity without complicating the overall assignment process
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques for hybrid behavioral pairing in a contact center system are disclosed. In one embodiment, the techniques may be realized as a method for hybrid behavioral pairing in a contact center system comprising: determining a first ordering of a plurality of contacts according to a behavioral pairing strategy with a balanced contact utilization; determining a second ordering of the plurality of contacts according to a performance-based routing strategy with an unbalanced contact utilization; determining a third ordering of the plurality of agents according to a combination of the first ordering and the second ordering having a skewed contact utilization between the balanced contact utilization and the unbalanced contact utilization; and outputting a hybrid behavioral pairing model based on the third ordering for connecting an agent to a contact of the plurality of contacts in the contact center system.