Creating skills and assigning them to agents

Defining skill types and values, giving them to agents, and the priority setting that decides who gets asked first.

Defining skill types and values, giving them to agents, and the priority setting that decides who gets asked first.

Create skills

1. Open Admin Center, then Objects and rules > Business rules > Skills.
2. Click New skill type, type a name such as Language, and press Enter. Names go up to 96 characters.
3. Add its skills: Dutch, English, German. A type holds up to 30.
4. Assign them to agents.
5. Build a trigger that puts the required skill on tickets.

Types and values

The type is the category and the values are the options. Language with three values is one type. Creating a separate type per language gives you three types with one value each, and nothing works the way you expect.

Required and optional, on the ticket

A skill on a ticket is either required or optional, and the difference is what happens when nobody suitable is free. A required skill never expires: the ticket waits until somebody who has it becomes available. An optional skill is subject to the routing configuration's skill timeout, and when that timeout passes routing starts dropping optional skills, lowest priority first, until it finds somebody.

So required means "this ticket is worthless in the wrong hands" and optional means "prefer this, but do not let it sit". Marking everything required is how a queue quietly stops moving on a Friday.

There is a second, separate priority, and the similar name causes confusion. Alongside the priority of a skill on a ticket, you can set the priority of a skill on an agent. Where that is used, routing looks for tickets needing that high-priority skill whenever the agent has room, so a specialist gets their specialism first rather than whatever happens to be at the front. Useful where somebody is the only person for something and you would rather that work found them.

Priority on the agent's side

Separately, an agent's own skill can be given a priority. It works the other way round: rather than routing preferring that agent for such tickets, routing looks through the queue for tickets needing that skill whenever the agent has spare capacity.

That is how you express "Anna is our best German speaker, but Bram can cover" without making Bram ineligible. Worth using. Without it you choose between everyone being equally eligible and only one person being eligible, and neither reflects a real team.

Putting skills on tickets

A trigger does this, usually from the language field, a category, or the brand. Without such a rule, tickets have no skills and skill routing does nothing at all.

Without that rule, a carefully built skill setup appears to have no effect.

Keep it current

Skills go stale. People learn things, move teams, and leave. A skills matrix that reflects last year sends work to someone who no longer does it, and holds work back from someone who could.

See also

• Managing skills on tickets
• Standalone skills-based routing with views
• Using skills to route tickets