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Creating agent skills to use for routing



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Aimee Spanier

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Jun 21, 2024


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56 comments

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Rafael Santos

User Group Leader

Hi Barry Neary, it would be interesting to have to options to flag skills as "must have" and "optional" so that we could determine those which must matched in order to assign, while having others that would be counted as optional when assigning to a set of multiple agents, trying to assign first to agents with the optional skill, and only if none available to those without.

Examples for these would be the hypothetical skill categories Language and Product Specialization.

The first would be a must have, as an agent would need to speak that language, while the second could be used to flag SMEs on a given topic.

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hi team,

If i want a ticket to be determined by language of the EU, do we need to put into the field language the role rule? For some reason all our tickets are determined to be English, even though they are in Latvian for example

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jeana

This article describes how Zendesk detects language - perhaps your users (and hence their tickets) are all being set as English due to the users being created by the admin?

Barry

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Harper Dane

Zendesk Luminary

If a ticket is updated so that it no longer meets a skill's conditions, the ticket will still require that skill until you manually remove it from the ticket.

 

What's the word on resolving this limitation?

We have been wanting to adopt Skills-based routing for ages, but cannot do so until either 1) this limitation is fixed so that Skills are re-applied upon ticket update, or 2) until we can write Triggers and/or Automations to reset the Skills applied to a ticket when certain conditions change.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Harper Dane

We are developing the ability to change skills on each ticket update and are planning a release in July

 

Barry

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Any news on the ability to use Tags in this Skills routing? We've set up some pretty elaborate automations in addition with a third-party AI tool and Zendesk's own tagging logic so that our tags are very comprehensive and used as the backbone of views, escalations etc. 

To have to recreate the very basics of this logic within Skills routing would be a huge headache. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi D.Fitz

Are you referring to chat tags?

Tags are fundementally different to skills in that omnichannel routing uses skills as a criteria for which agent to pick - i.e. one who has the skills that the ticket requires. So you can still use all your tags as the basis for views and escalations, and which group should be assigned a ticket. But after the ticket is assigned to the group, use skills to decide which agent in the group should receive the ticket

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Hey Barry, 

I'm referring to ticket tags. 

We're already using a variety of tools and processes to tag tickets accordingly and then predominantly using these tags to populate views. From what I can see, the options of ticket fields are quite limited, so any attempt at recreating this logic within Skills just doesn't seem to come close to our existing logic for applying tags. We don't even seem to be able to filter by Group. 

I notice in another post you mentioned that it's now possible to apply Skills via triggers in Omni-channel routing, but I can't see that option here either. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

The option to add skills via triggers is only available if you switch omnichannel routing on.

Could you explain the use case that you are truing to achieve with skills?

 

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Hi Barry Neary,

I created a skill called Poland based on some customers from that region. And I assigned this skill to an agent and turned the omnichannel routing on

This agent has a capacity of 20 tickets but at some days the flow is less. It seems like they are also getting tickets which has a 'null' skill. Is there any way to limit routing of cases with the matching skill ONLY. And not the null ones.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi karankuwarbidxb

Could you set a skill on all tickets (you could call it 'null'). Then give the agent the skill Poland but not the skill null. That way they would only receive polish skill tickets?

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Hi, I'm looking to enable Omnichannel routing, and I see that skill-based routing is the "answer" for managing overflow. What I'm wondering is how to manage changes to the agent's skills. For example, on Monday's I need group A to be skilled so they receive calls first, but on Tuesday it switches to group B. Can the agent skills be changed via API or some other automated method?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Tim, yes  - there is a skills api documented here

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My agents don't seem to be able to view their Skills on their Profile page - is this by design? How can our agents view the skills assigned to them?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi D. Fitz

 

If you click on the gear icon in skills page, you can set whether agents can view or edit their skills:

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Thanks Barry but this setting says “Select which roles can manage skills on individual tickets.” Is there no way for Agents to be able to see their assigned Skills on their Profile page?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi D Fitz

 

It also controls whether skills appear on the agent profile and whether they are editable or not by the agent

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hmm that doesn't seem to be our experience. Have tried a variety of settings with a variety of agents logging out, clearing cache etc but they aren't able to view Skills in their agent profile at all. 

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hey Barry Neary, do we have any updates on this? We can only utilize skills if they are applied when the ticket is updated to meet the conditions of the actual ticket fields.cc Harper Dane 
 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi D. Fitz

Could you raise a support ticket if thats not the way it works for you?

Barry

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

HI Henrique 

 

YOu can add or remove a skill using  a trigger. Each time a ticket is created or update, the triggers are checked and fire if the trigger conditions are met

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Thank you Barry Neary ! I appreciate your quick response! 
 

Unfortunately, we cannot set omnichannel as it messes up with our chat feature. But thank you anyway! :) 
 

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Hi Barry Neary

 

Regarding your post above, Shimbey in your technical team has confirmed that there is no way for agents to view Skills on their own profile. Seems an oversight with Skills in general and probably worth aligning on this so that customers aren't misinformed. 

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Tony

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi David,
thank you for your feedback and sharing that information with us. We really appreciate it.
 
Best,

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Bobby Koch

Zendesk Luminary

Barry Neary any plans to incorporate skills weighting? i.e., 

 

Skill A: 5 pts

Skill B: 1 pt

I.e., search for the person best equipped to handle the interaction, and have some fallbacks?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Bobby Koch 

 

To confirm, the weighting represents the agent's competency in the skill e.g. 1= novice and 5=expert

 

We do have long term plans to include skills competency, but before then our plan is to allow an agents skills to be prioritized, e.g. if I speak Polish and English, I can have Polish by my higher priority skill and so I will receive Polish tickets before English ones

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