Skills-based routing enables admins to set up skills‐attributes associated with individual agents and sets of ticket conditions. A view can be configured to show different matching tickets depending on who’s looking at it.
The following recommendations can help you get started:
- Work out your skills in advance. It’ll be easier to make revisions.
- Check your skills coverage. Do you have enough agents for common skills and combinations?
- Organize skills into categories. You’ll bundle similar skills together when you set them up in Zendesk.
- Define your ticket conditions based on information present at creation. But don’t save them until they’re ready to run.
- Start with a small end-to-end test. This release gives you the tools you need. With a handful of trusted agents, figure out the best setup and work out any problems.
- Have agents work from one broadly-defined view. Let the skills matching logic do the differentiating work.
Work out your skills in advance
A lot of setting up skills-based routing is going to be investigating, strategizing, and planning. Figuring out what skills you need, who has them, and how they can replace existing rules. We recommend you do a lot of that work offline, before you start setting things up in Zendesk. The Zendesk skills interface is pretty straightforward, but it’s always going to be easier to rearrange things in a spreadsheet or other document.
A skill can be any attribute that determines an agent’s suitability to work on a given ticket. You’re probably already thinking about these on some level, as reflected in your workflow and organizational structure.
Look at your existing configuration:
- Review your triggers, groups, and views. Which ones exist to segregate tickets to certain agents? Many of those can be replaced with skills-based routing.
- If you’re using Zendesk’s localization feature, it’ll be easy to set up Language skills. The same language detection condition used for other rules can be used for routing, too.
Look at your organization:
- Figure out what sets your agents apart from each other. Seniority? Training? Consider if you’d like to set up skills and route tickets based on those variables.
- Figure out what sets your tickets apart from each other. Is there a lot of variation?
- Talk to your team or team lead. Are there generally understood to be “go-to” or “no-go” people for certain topics?
Check your skills coverage
If there’s only one agent who has a certain popular skill or combination of skills, that agent could get overloaded pretty quick.
Work with your team lead or talk to your agents. Of the skills you determined you need, who can do what?
Did you use groups to identify skills previously? Who was in those groups? Was their workload well balanced?
Identify common skill combinations, and how many agents would have all of them. You might discover that you need to train or even hire agents to get the coverage you need.
Organize skills into categories
When you set up skills in Zendesk, you’ll be creating “skill types” first, then the specific skills. For example, “Language” is a skill type. “Spanish” is a skill.
Working this out ahead of time will make setting up skills in Zendesk a breeze. Thinking about skills at a category level could also help you identify ones that you hadn’t thought of.
Define your ticket conditions based on information present at creation
For each skill, how will Zendesk know that a ticket requires it?
In the skill setup screen, you’ll see a drop-down listing all the conditions you can use. You can choose from conditions that are typically available at ticket creation.
What is your customer declaring when they fill out a request? How do they map to skills? Custom fields and forms can be used, and are really useful for routing.
You can set up skills as placeholders, but we don’t recommend setting up conditions until you’re sure they’re right. Otherwise you risk having the wrong skills applied to tickets, and you’ll have to update them by hand.
Start with one skill type and a couple of skills that you’ve had the chance to think
Start with a small end-to-end test
Once you have a couple of skills configured and running, add yourself to them. Set up a view for yourself with a skill match column. Are you seeing checkmarks where you expect them to be? Add a skills match filter to that view. You shouldn’t see any tickets without a checkmark.
Look at the tickets. Once you’ve set up at least one skill, you’ll see a Skills box on each ticket. (Only admins can see this in the current version.) Are you seeing the right skills in it? If not, you can fix it right in the ticket, and then tweak your conditions to get a better result next time.
Consider asking one or two agents to do a pilot using the skills match column. Pick a view they use often, and clone it so other agents aren’t distracted by the checkmarks. (Note that the column isn’t compatible with the Play button or Guided Mode.) How does it go?
Expand the pilot by using the skills match filter instead of the column. Now the agents can use play or Guided Mode. Is this easier for your agents?
In some cases, the filter might work better because it allows an agent to focus on matching tickets and move through them quickly. In other cases, the column might work better because the agent can still see tickets that aren’t exact skill matches (perhaps you want them to learn, or make sure that tickets matching nobody’s skills are still addressed). Also, note that not all views can have the skills filter applied, in which case you would use the column.
Have agents work from one broadly defined view
Skills-based routing offers greater efficiency because where you might have needed multiple views to reflect different combinations of skills, you can now have one view dynamically represent that for you. Once you’re ready to operationalize skills-based routing, set up a view that’s broad enough for many agents to work out of it. No more switching between lots of different views!
Depending on the outcome of your pilot, you may choose to use a filtered view, or the skills match column. If you use the filtered view, it will be flagged prominently so agents are aware they’re not seeing all the tickets in the view. As an admin, you’ll also see the view filtered against your own skills.
In order to keep an eye on all tickets in a filtered view, make a cloned version if you haven’t already. The clone won’t have the filter, so you can see if any tickets risk getting missed because they don’t match anyone’s skills. Use the skill match column and set up your own skills to represent the skills of all your agents, so you can spot those orphaned tickets by their lack of a checkmark.
15 Comments
I'm yet to receive this feature, and don't know what is currently planned, but please, please add an option to filter skills (like a drop down box) within a view, without the need for multiple views.
Some agents will be highly skilled and in some cases may want to focus on a particular skill at a time... 10 views for 10 different skills would not be very effective.
Or better yet, add a dropdown option to filter any visible column in a view.
Am I correct that this flags the ticket(s) as matching a skill set and then these tickets can manually be assigned to a user?
@justin -- we're definitely thinking about how agents will be able to focus on one skill at a time.
@bill -- this is still the paradigm of agents pulling tickets from a view. They'll just be able to zero in on the ones that they can best answer, and skip the ones they can't. Having someone else do the assignment (triage) based on skill match isn't the use case we're supporting just yet.
UPDATED JUNE 2019: The suggestion below was intended to direct all immediate post-launch feedback to a single place. Since we archive product announcements after a while, the links no longer worked so I removed them. I am leaving the text up for the record. If you have feedback on the Routing feature, please submit it to the regular Product Feedback forum. Thanks! Kristen
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There's been such great feedback in the comments sections of a few different articles relating to the current release of Skills-Based Routing.
We'd love to have most of that happening in one place, and we think the release announcement makes the most sense.
So if you'd like to provide input, please do it there! It'll be easier for us to respond, and you'll be able to see and engage with others' ideas as well.
Thank you -- we're so grateful for your feedback. It's one of the main reasons we're taking an iterative approach, which gives us the chance to take it into consideration while we're still designing and planning. Keep it coming! (Just, over there.)
This seems like a very promising idea,
Although I'm having issues , I setup a test skill , using conditions of just one ticket form type I have, yet when I goto the view of all tickets and add the skills match column , its ticked for every single ticket.
Is this because I'm viewing the view as the agent I setup under the skill I added ?
@Andrew this is because none of the existing tickets have required skills as skills are only applied at Ticket creation. Therefore any existing ticket will have no skills required and every agent can handle those tickets.
It might be possible to add skills to the existing tickets, but this looks to be a manual only process at the moment.
I think it makes more sense to have check mark ONLY for tickets that have skills.
At the moment our teams handle all tickets regardless, so being able to easily identify what tickets are actually within their skill sets would be easier if only skill based tickets had check marks.
@sahar True, however the idea from my understanding is that we are preparing for "Skills-based routing" meaning that once this feature is fully operational, all ticket without a skill will not be assigned.
It sounds like to cater for both use cases we need more than just a "skill match" condition.
I have been messing with this skill based routing and have a couple questions.
Say you have an org called 1 and another called 2. You want only certain agents to be able to respond to those tickets.
Skill 'special' says under the ANY section that if the ticket has org is 1 or 2 then it is special.
Skill 'general' says under the ANY section that if the ticket org is not 1 or 2 then it is general.
I put in a test ticket with a person with org 1 and the ticket game in with both skills. But the skill match did not show a check mark. Before i made skill general the intial skill seemed to work fine.
Also, Using the skill match field on a view shows those tickets that match a skill or not. But from what I can tell this does not actually stop an agent from opening a ticket they do not have a match for. Is this correct or is my setup wonky?
Hi Ed,
We'll need to take a look at a few ticket examples to see where this issue is coming from in your account. I'm going to create a ticket and pass this over to our Customer Advocacy team for further assistance.
Once you receive email confirmation that you're ticket has been created, feel free to reply back to that with any additional information you can provide.
Cheers!
Hey,
I can't access the the release announcement to comment with some feedback.
I was wondering if you had any plans on the roadmap that would allow the routing to kick in shortly after ticket creation.
We use a solution that reads and tags the the ticket based on what the customer is saying in the contents of the ticket.
That tag is of course applied only shortly after the ticket is actually created. So for us it would be better to have the skillbased routing kick in only after those tags are applied.
We can currently emulate skillbased through some complex trigger systems but its not very easy.
Having skill based routing only kick on at X point in the flow might be beneficial for a number of use cases.(If I am a large company and have Tier 1 generalist and then tier 2 specialist, allowing Tier 1 to tag and then have those tickets hit the skill based routing could be beneficial).
A world where, when the agents hits the play button it scans all ticket everywhere that meets the skills they have, considers priority of those tickets and then serves those to agent seems ideal.
Hi Dwayne,
The article you're referencing was the announcement article which has since been replace with this article: Using skills-based routing (Enterprise)
As for plans on the roadmap, our Product Managers are always looking for ways to improve the skills-based routing feature. This includes automatically routing tickets to the appropriate team. While I can't confirm what's currently on the roadmap, do know that this is definitely functionality they're interested in implementing :)
Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us. I'll be sure to pass it along to the appropriate team!
There's been such great feedback in the comments sections of a few different articles relating to the current release of Skills-Based Routing.
It would be great to go over there...to the release announcement, but I get this error:
We'd love to have most of that happening in one place, and we think the release announcement makes the most sense.
Hi Stassa,
That article has since been archived which is why you're receiving that error. For information on skills-based routing, you can take a look at the following article: Using skills-based routing (Enterprise)
Our Product Managers have reviewed the feedback provided in that article and if you'd like to provide any additional feedback you can do so in our Support Product Feedback forum which I've linked for you. This is the primary channel our Product Managers use to collect user feedback.
I hope the above information helps!
Thank you
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