Weights

Member weighting is used to increase (or decrease) the portion of assignments that are made to individual router members.

Adjusting Weights

Follow these steps to adjust member weights:

1. Navigate to a Kubaru Router.
2. Scroll down to the Members section and click the Manage Members button.
3. Edit the individual member weights in the Weight column.
4. Click Save.

How Weighting Works

Member weighting can be applied to round robin, load balance, and territory routers. However, it works a little differently in each scenario.

Round Robin Routers

Weighting functions work with Round Robin to “tip the scales” of the rotation toward or away from certain members, as desired. You might do this when assigning more records to a senior member of a team. For example, without any weights, Round Robin will assign a record to member A, then B, then C, then back to A, B, C, and so on. Let’s say we want member A to receive 2x the number of assignments as B and C. Doing so would make the assignment cycle look like so: A, B, A, C, A, B, A, C, and so on.

Load Balance Routers

Weighting in a load balance scenario is stating what proportionality should be considered “balanced”. Let’s again say that member A has a weight of 2, while members B and C remain at 1. Member A has 10 active records, member B has 7, and member C has 6. Without weighting, you would expect member C to receive the next record. But because member A is set to 2x, he is next in line. “Balance” in this case means member A should have 2x the number of active records as members B and C.

Territory Routers

Use Round Robin within each territory

Weighting works in a similar fashion to how it works with Round Robin. Though note that a very crucial difference with territory assignment is that it effectively generates multiple round robin assignments within a single router. Despite this, weighting can only be set per member, but not necessarily per member per territory. Therefore, anything you set in the weighting will take effect across all territories to which that member is assigned.

To illustrate, let’s say you have three members: A, B, and C. And you have three territories: 1, 2, and 3. And we have territories assigned as:

• Territory 1: A, B
• Territory 2: B, C
• Territory 3: C

Now, let’s say we assign member A’s weight to 1, member B’s weight to 2, and member C’s weight to 1. This means the assignment queue in each territory will look like so:

• Territory 1: B, A, B
• Territory 2: B, C, B
• Territory 3: C

Notice that member B in both territories 1 and 2 will receive 2x the number of records as the other member. You can see how their increased weight is manifesting itself in every territory to which member B is assigned.

If the intention however was only to weight member B at a higher rate in territory 1 but not 2, it might be worth considering breaking these into two separate Round Robin routers instead of assigning them through a territory router. The advantage of a territory router is efficiency, especially if you have a high number of territories. But if you need more granular control over each sub-rotation, breaking them into multiple round robin routers (with territory criteria loaded into distribution filters) can achieve just that.

Use Load Balance within each territory

Weighting works just as a normal load balance router would work, with the difference being that the scope of users whose workload is being compared to decide who gets the next record is done separately within each territory.

Skill-Based Routers

This is a beta feature that must first be activated in the Settings tab of the Kubaru Console by checking “Skill-Based Assignment Weighting (beta)”

Available in Version 5.6 and up

Use Round Robin when multiple users qualify for assignment

Weighting here is more complex than with a traditional round robin router due to various skills potentially skewing the results. For instance, say you have a lead router where John has a weight of 2 and Mary has a weight of 1. Generally speaking this means John should receive 2 leads for every 1 lead received by Mary. However, Mary may be equipped with skills that John does not have (or vice versa).

For instance, if Mary speaks Spanish, then leads that require this skill will go to Mary, even if those leads would otherwise have gone to John by virtue of weighting. This means that in practice, while the weighting will tend to favor John 2x over Mary, Mary may end up with more than half the number of lead assignments that John has due to her Spanish-speaking lead assignments.

In other words, John will receive 2x more lead assignments than Mary if skill assignments between the two are equal.

Use Load Balance when multiple users qualify for assignment

Weighting works just as it would with a Load Balance router, the main difference being that the group of users whose workload is being compared for a given assignment will be comprised of those who have the required skills for it.

For instance, let’s say a case router consists of Frank, Jill, Bob and Justine, but only Frank and Justine have the “Tier 2” skill. When a case that requires this skill is evaluated for assignment, only Frank and Justine’s workloads will be compared to determine who gets the assignment.