Routing chats based on agent skills

Skills routing provides a way to identify specific skills for both visitors and agents and route chats accordingly, helping make sure your customers get the relevant and targeted support they need. For example, you might want to create a skill for Spanish-speaking visitors and agents so that chats are automatically routed appropriately.

To use skills-based routing, you must have assigned chat routing enabled. See Setting up chat routing for information.

Note: Skills-based routing does not currently work with Zendesk messaging.

This article contains the following sections:

• Understanding how skills routing logic works
• Creating skills
• Assigning skills to agents
• Adding skill tags to visitors
• Enabling skills routing

For answers to some common questions about skills-based routing, see our Chat skills-based routing FAQ.

Understanding how skills routing logic works

There are a few different conditions that affect how chats are routed with skills routing. Keep in mind the following:

• Agents must have all of the skills a visitor has to be routed chats for that visitor. For example, if a visitor is tagged with skills A, B, and C, but an agent is only tagged with skills A and B, that visitor's chats will not be routed to the agent.
• Maximum wait time, which is set when you enable the feature (see Enabling skills routing below) specifies the amount of time a chat will wait for an agent with the exact set of skills. Once the maximum wait time has elapsed, the chat is assigned to any other agent within the department, based on the number of concurrent chats being served.
• Agents set to Invisible, Away, or Offline are not included in the queue for routing.

Creating skills

Before you can route chats based on skills, you need to create skills that you'll later assign to your agents and visitors.

To create a skill

1. Select Settings > Routing, then select the Skills tab.
2. Click Add Skills.
3. Enter a name for your skill.
4. Click Create Skill.

   

Note: Skills need to be enabled to work with skilled based routing. To enable Skills go to Settings > Routing, then select the Skills tab and click on the skill to edit it and change the Skill Status to Enabled.

Assigning skills to agents

After you've created the appropriate skills, you need to assign them to agents so they can be routed the correct chats. Agents can be assigned a maximum of five skills.

There are a few different ways you can manage agent skills.

To assign skills to agents in bulk

1. Select Settings > Agents.
2. Select the check box next to the agent or agents you want to assign skills to.
3. Click the Actions drop-down menu and select Assign Skills.
4. In the window that appears, select skills to add from the drop-down menu.

   

5. Click Assign.

To assign or remove skills for individual agents

1. Select Settings > Agents.
2. Click then name of the agent you want to assign skills to to open their profile.
3. In the Skills field, select the drop-down menu and search for or select skills to assign. To remove a skill, click the X next to it.
4. Click Save changes.

To assign skills to yourself

1. Select Settings > Personal > Profile.
2. In the Profile tab under Preferences, select the drop-down menu in the Skills field and search for or select skills to assign.
3. Click Save Changes.

Adding skill tags to visitors

Next, you'll need to make sure skill tags are assigned to the appropriate visitors. You can do this using triggers or with the Javascript API. Just like agents, visitors can be assigned a maximum of five skills.

Note: When tagging visitors with a two-letter country code, make sure the code is uppercase. Lowercase codes are not recognized in triggers.

To set up a trigger to assign tags

1. From the dashboard, select Settings > Triggers.
2. Click Add Trigger.
3. Enter a name and brief description for your trigger.
4. Click Enabled at the top to enable your trigger.
5. In the Customize Trigger section, configure to check conditions related to your skill and assign the tag accordingly.
6. Click Create Trigger.

For more details on setting up triggers, see Working with triggers.

To add skill tags using the Javascript API

• Learn more about the Javascript API here.

Enabling skills routing

The final step in the process is to the enable skills-based routing feature. Note that in order to use this feature, you must already have chat routing enabled. For details about chat routing, see Setting up chat routing.

To enable skills routing

1. Select Settings > Routing.
2. Click the Settings tab, and make sure you have selected Assigned for chat routing.
3. In the Skills Routing section, select On.
4. Select a value in the Maximum Wait Time field. This setting determines how many seconds a visitor should wait in the queue for an agent with matching skills before being reassigned to another available agent.

   

5. Click Save Changes.