Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Support Enterprise |
| Access | Admin |
Skills reach a ticket by trigger and can be adjusted by hand afterwards. The setting that decides whether a ticket ever gets picked up is whether the skill is optional or required.
Set skills automatically
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers, and create or edit a trigger.
- Under Conditions, specify what determines the skill: the language field, a category, the brand, the form.
- Under Actions, choose Add skills or Set skills and pick the skills.
- Mark each skill optional or required.
- Place the trigger above your routing rules.
With omnichannel routing on, triggers assign skills at ticket creation and on updates, which is more flexible than the older skill-specific routing rules that could only act at creation.
Optional or required decides who waits
An optional skill is dropped from consideration when a skills timeout occurs. A required skill never times out.
That is the answer to the failure this article used to only warn about: a ticket carrying a skill nobody available holds waits indefinitely, and nothing flags it. Marking the skill optional lets the ticket fall through to somebody rather than sitting there. Reserve required for skills where the wrong agent genuinely cannot handle the work, such as a regulated language or a certification.
The timeout does not behave the same on every channel, so check the channel before you set one. On email it works as you would expect: nobody suitable is free, the clock runs out, the optional skills are dropped. On messaging and calls the clock only runs while nobody with the skill is available. If one skilled agent is online with spare capacity, routing keeps offering the conversation to them and the timeout never fires, however long they leave it.
And the clock resets. A ticket that goes back into a queue, after a reassignment or a reopen, has all its skills applied again and times them out from the beginning.
If you have old routing rules
Zendesk recommends deleting skill-specific routing rules and rebuilding the logic as triggers. If you leave them, they still run before triggers and other business rules at ticket creation, and they cannot add or update skills after that. An account that has both is being routed by the older mechanism first, which is rarely what anybody intends.
Adjust by hand, and keep the count low
Agents with the right permission can add or remove skills on a ticket, which is the usual fix when a rule got it wrong or a conversation turns out to need something the original request did not suggest. Removing a skill widens who can take it.
Each skill narrows the pool, and they combine: two skills means agents who hold both, which can be one person or nobody. Before adding a second skill to a rule, work out how many agents would satisfy both. Under three and you have built a bottleneck.
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