What is the difference between skills-based routing and predictive pairing?
Skills-based routing picks the group: Spanish-speaking consumers to your Spanish-speaking team, large balances to your senior collectors. Predictive pairing works inside that group and picks which collector on the team takes each account, based on who has done best with accounts like it in your own history. Your routing rules stay as they are; pairing adds one decision at the end.
New to BestPair? See what it is and how it works
Side by side
| Skills-based routing | Predictive pairing | |
|---|---|---|
| What it decides | Which group or queue an account goes to | Which collector in that group works it |
| What it is based on | Rules you set: language, licence, balance band, product | Who has done best with accounts like it, from your own call and payment history |
| What it sees | The skill a collector has | How well each collector does on each kind of account |
| What changes on the floor | Nothing new; most floors already run it | Which accounts land in each collector’s list |
| On a predictive dialer | The router’s own segments | BestPair defines the segments the router uses |
Why one decision more makes a difference
A single ranking hides your specialists. A collector who looks average overall can be one of your strongest on one type of account and below average on another. Skills routing cannot see that, because a skill is a yes or no, and a leaderboard cannot see it either, because it averages everything.
Send everything to your top-ranked collectors and you spend them on accounts anyone competent would close, while the accounts that needed a particular collector go to whoever is next. Why not give your best collectors every account.
How it reaches the floor
- Preview or manual dialer. One file of assignments each morning, naming the collector for each account plus backups, loaded the way you load lists today.
- Predictive dialer. BestPair works through the dialer’s existing skills-based router: it defines which accounts sit in each segment and which collectors can work it, and the router does the rest.
- Progressive or power dialer. Named collectors where the dialer supports agent-owned lists, segments where it does not.
Common follow-up questions
Do we have to change our routing rules?
No. Language, licensing, balance bands and any other rules you route by stay in place. Pairing only chooses among the collectors your rules already allow.
What it could mean on your floor
Two minutes
Watch the explainer
What your dialer does with the next account, what pairing changes, and what the Floor Assessment measures. With captions.
Watch the videoYour floor
Try the calculator
Four numbers off your dialer and collections reports give an illustrative figure for your floor. It is at best informed guesswork until your own history is measured.
Open the calculatorA live test
Read the case study
170,000 telecom accounts split at random before the first call, and how the result was counted.
Read it
Would it be a bad idea to spend 45 minutes finding out?
If your shop does not qualify, you will hear it on the call, not after you have paid for a report.
Book a 45-minute fit call