Region & skill routing
A case should reach someone who can actually handle it. Parrot picks an owner by region first, specialisation second, then language and availability.
Configure both under Settings → Regions & Skills.
Regions
Add the cities or territories you serve, each with the other spellings customers really use:
| Field | Example | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yangon | Matched against the customer's words |
| Aliases | rangoon, ygn, yangoon | Catches local names and misspellings |
| Timezone | Asia/Yangon | Used for reporting |
| Default | on | Used when no region is mentioned |
The agent works out the region in this order:
- What the customer wrote — "I'm in Yangon" wins over anything stored.
- What we already know about the contact, remembered from last time.
- The default region, if one is set.
When a request depends on location — a booking, a visit, a delivery — and none of the three gives an answer, the agent asks the customer where they are, then remembers it on the contact so it is only asked once.
Skills
Each person gets three optional lists:
- Regions covered — leave empty to cover everywhere.
- Specialises in — free text that suits your business:
acne,face,laser,refunds. - Languages — two-letter codes; empty means any.
Empty means no limit, not no match. A new member with nothing set can take any case, so routing never stalls while you finish configuring.
How the winner is chosen
Every eligible person is scored:
| Signal | Weight |
|---|---|
| Covers the customer's region | +100 |
| Covers only other regions | −100 |
| Specialises in the topic | +50 |
| Speaks the customer's language | +25 |
| Cannot speak it | −25 |
| Online right now | +10 |
Region outranks specialisation on purpose: a Yangon booking handled from Mandalay is wrong even by an expert. Anyone already at their case limit is skipped. When two people tie, the queue's own strategy (round robin, fewest cases, random) breaks it, so your queue settings still matter.
Worked example. A customer writes "I want to book something for my acne, I'm in Yangon." The agent reads the region as Yangon and the topic as acne — a specialisation one of your staff holds. Someone covering Yangon who specialises in acne scores 150; a Yangon generalist scores 100; an acne specialist who only covers Mandalay scores −50. The first person gets the case.
Check it before customers do
Settings → Regions & Skills → Test routing takes a message written the way a customer would write it and shows the region it detected, the topic it inferred, who would get the case and why. Nothing is created — it is a dry run.
If the topic comes back empty, the message did not contain any specialisation you have configured. The tester lists the ones it recognises so you can add the missing word to someone's skills.