Siebel Email Response Administration Guide > Completing Basic Setup Tasks >

Implementing Routing and Queuing Processes

Siebel Email Response workflows record incoming emails in your database, except for messages identified as junk email. The eMail Response - Process Message workflow creates an activity record and the eMail Response - Process Service Request workflow creates a service request record.

The Process Message and the Process Service Request workflows can use the routing and queuing features in Siebel Assignment Manager and Siebel Universal Queuing to further automate your email interactions. Routing and queuing application choices include Siebel Assignment Manager, Siebel Universal Queuing, and third-party universal queuing applications. See Performing a Business Analysis for Your Siebel Email Response Deployment, where you determined the routing and queuing method you will implement.

Siebel Assignment Manager can assign ownership of email activities and service requests. Siebel Universal Queuing can queue an email to a specific individual based on real-time analysis of agent availability, agent skills, language, and variety of other routing and escalation attributes.

Your organization can use the preconfigured routing and queuing rules provided by Siebel Email Response, revise the preconfigured rules, or create new rules. Before you start Siebel Email Response and process your incoming email messages, you must activate the Siebel Email Response workflows, make changes to the routing and queuing method you choose to implement, and start the server tasks associated with that routing and queuing method.

You can route email in one of the following ways:

• Manual assignment. A person dedicated to the routing process manually assigns each incoming email to an agent as it arrives, or agents select a message from a message queue.
• Siebel Assignment Manager. You can use Assignment Manager to assign emails by setting the Enable Assignment Manager process property in the Email Response - Process Message workflow in the following ways:
  • Assignment Manager will assign emails for all response groups if you set the process property to TRUE.
  • Assignment Manager will assign emails for a specific response group if you set the process property to TRUE for that response group.

    CAUTION:  When you create or update assignment rules, you must stop the Communications Inbound Manager component in order to suspend the processing of new inbound email. After you have stopped the CIM component, you can create/update and then release the assignment rules, and then restart the CIM component.

    After enabling Assignment Manager, you use information in Siebel Assignment Manager Administration Guide to:

  • Verify that each employee in your database has been assigned the appropriate skills to respond to incoming email. For example, you might assign each employee an email recipient address and define competencies, expertise level, and exception hours.
  • Set up the service regions and associate each employee with a service region.
  • Create new assignment rules, assign criteria, define employees, and release the rules.
  • Activate Territory Assignment Manager.
  • Test your Territory Assignment Manager setup.
• Siebel Universal Queuing or a third-party universal queuing product. You can use UQ to assign emails by setting the Enable Universal Queuing process property in the eMail Response - Process Message workflow in the following ways:
  • UQ will route and escalate emails for all response groups if you set the process property to TRUE.
  • UQ will route and escalate emails for a specific response group if you set the process property to TRUE for that response group.

    After enabling UQ, use information in Siebel Universal Queuing Administration Guide to perform the following tasks in the UQ Administration screen:

  • In the Channels view, create one email channel and add properties. Two properties can be used for Siebel Email Response channels: Receiver Address and Sender Address.
  • In the Routes view, create routes, escalations, and escalation rules and associate escalation rules with routes.
    • Routes define high-level criteria such as route priority and service-level times.
    • An escalation step defines the time an email can wait in queue before it is passed to the next step. Steps are assigned an order number to control the escalation sequence.
    • Escalation rules establish the criteria that determine the agent skills (such as language and level of product knowledge) that are necessary to handle each escalation step.
  • In the Employees view, for each employee, assign skills, employee competencies for each skill, expertise for each competency, and the number of simultaneous sessions the employee can have open.
    • Assign skill categories such as language, employee competencies, and expertise for each competency, such as French (Expert) and English (Novice).
    • Select the email channel and assign the maximum number of email items (Simultaneous Sessions) for a specific channel that an agent can be assigned at any given time. This number must be at least 1 for the agent to receive email for the email channel. When set to 1, an agent can receive a maximum of one work item at a time for that channel.
  • Activate UQ and test your UQ setup.