Standalone skills-based routing with views

Skills can narrow views instead of driving assignment, which suits teams that still want agents to choose.

Skills can narrow views instead of driving assignment, which suits teams that still want agents to choose.

What standalone means

Skills without omnichannel routing. Tickets carry skills, and views filter on them, so an agent sees the work they can do. Nothing is assigned automatically; they still pick.

Build a skills-based view

1. Set up skills, assign them to agents, and put them on tickets by rule.
2. Create a view and add the condition Skills Is Current user skills. Everyone sees the same view and each agent sees their own tickets in it.
3. Share it with the relevant group.
4. Check the preview shows what you expect.

Two things about that condition. Tickets carrying no skill are excluded from such a view, so add a second view with Skills Is No skills for the unclassified pile; the two conditions cannot be combined in one view. And standalone skills cannot be used for voice and messaging tickets.

Do not use the old skills-match view

Support has two mechanisms with almost the same name, and only one of them is worth building on.

• A view with a skills-based condition is the one described above and the one Zendesk recommends. You can have as many as you like, there is no cap on how many tickets are assessed or shown, and the results paginate.
• A skills-match view is the older mechanism, applied as a filter rather than a condition. You may only have one in the whole account, it displays the first 30 tickets and no more, and above roughly 3,000 tickets some do not appear even though their skills are correct.

That 30-ticket limit is the one to watch. A team working from a skills-match view sees a short list, assumes that is the work, and never learns about the rest.

One difference in the other direction: a skills-match view includes tickets with no skills, while a condition-based view leaves them out. That is the gap the second view fills.

Then the design question

• One view per skill, such as a Dutch queue. Clear, and easier to supervise.
• One view matching the viewer's own skills, so a single view serves everybody and each person sees what they can handle. This scales better.

Why choose this over full routing

• You want the benefit of skills without taking choice away from agents.
• Your team is small enough that assignment is not the problem.
• You are introducing skills gradually and want to see how they behave first.

That last one is a good reason. Skills in views is a low-risk way to find out whether your skills model matches reality before it decides who gets what.

Validate the views

A skills-based view that returns nothing usually means tickets are not getting the skill, not that there is no work. Check a recent ticket for its skills before assuming the view is wrong.

See also

• Managing skills on tickets
• My view shows no tickets: what to check
• Using skills to route tickets