Imagine your Facebook feed, which is personalized for you. Now imagine an algorithm that presents work which is personalized for you.

With Directly’s latest innovation in data-driven routing, this personalized work cue is now possible for experts. The routing technology custom distributes each and every customer support inquiry to the support expert in your network that is the most eager and qualified to resolve that issue.

Directly Data Scientist Eugene Mandel, who developed the data-driven routing, says it is not all that different from how Facebook decides what to put at the top of your newsfeed.

Like A Facebook Feed for Work

“Facebook applies algorithms and machine learning to re-sort the items at the top of your newsfeed,” Mandel explains. “It is predicting which items you will like and which are the most relevant to you and making them bubble up based on your previous history.”

“This is very similar to how we want work items to appear in the queue of an expert.”

And like Facebook’s algorithms, Directly’s data-driven routing will continually learn from the actions of your network, forming what Directly CEO Antony Brydon calls a “closed loop” of knowledge.

“One of our core features is what we call high performance routing,” explains Brydon. “That is the ability to take a customer’s question and deliver it to precisely the right experts to solve it based on a number of different factors such as reputation, skill, and availability.”

But now, with the implementation of data-driven routing, Directly will also be able to analyze each expert’s history to learn which experts are the best at resolving certain issues, and then route the inquiries accordingly.

Efficiently Matching Questions with Experts

“Our data-driven routing now adjusts the work given to experts by accounting for the types of inquiries they have resolved in the past,” Brydon said. “It is essentially a machine-learning algorithm that learns not only what experts are good at, but also learns what kinds of tickets and work they like to do.”

“We are now constantly acquiring data and factoring that data into every decision we make,” Brydon said. “We go from routing inquiries based on a fixed number of attributes to now routing them based on an infinite amount of attributes.”

In other words, the more data the system collects, the more efficiently inquiries are routed.

Directly Product Manager Jeff Patterson says the benefits of data-driven routing are fundamental.

“This will decrease response times because experts’ feeds will become more personalized and will increase response rates and CSAT because the experts are dealing with only the inquiries they are most capable of handling,” Patterson said.

Brydon says data-driven routing aligns with the company’s broader vision of efficiently distributing work across a network.

“This is about having the intelligence to increasingly distribute the work to the right people,” Brydon said. “When we talk about companies efficiently distributing their work across their networks, these kinds of data-driven algorithms are core to distributing work efficiently.”