With skills-based routing, admins and agents in custom roles with permission can create skills and associate each one with individual agents. For each skill, you also define a set of ticket conditions that require the skills.
This article contains the following topics:
Understanding skills
Skills are agent attributes that determine their suitability to work a ticket that requires them. They can be something the agent is able to do, as we'd typically think of a skill, or another type of attribute, such as the agent's location, timezone.
When adding skills, you'll create skill types to categorize the skills. For example, you could have agents dedicated to supporting specific products; in this scenario you could create a Product skill type and add ProductA, ProductB, and ProductC as the skills.
You can define up to 10 skill types. Each skill type can contain up to 30 skills.
- A name
- A way to add that skill to tickets
- A set of agents who have that skill
Understanding how skills are used for routing
There are two ways to use skills to route tickets:
- Omnichannel routing. Tickets are automatically assigned to agents with matching skills. Optionally, you can configure a skills timeout, after which a ticket can be automatically assigned to agents without regard to skills.
- Standalone skills-based routing. Agents use one or more views to identify tickets that match their skills and then manually assign tickets to themselves.
Planning your skills
Whether you're using skills with omnichannel routing or as a standalone routing solution, it's important to plan out your skills strategically. You should understand what skills you need, who has them, and how they might replace existing business rules.
Review the following details for your organization to help identify the skills you want to use:
- Your triggers, groups, and views. Which ones exist to segregate tickets to certain agents? Many of those can be replaced with skills-based routing.
- Zendesk’s localization feature or intelligent triage. If you're using localization or intelligent triage, the same language detection can be used as a condition to add a language skill to a ticket.
- 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? Of the skills you've determined you need, who can do what?
- Agents are only considered a match if they have all of the skills required by a ticket. After deciding which skills to use, identify common skill combinations and how many agents have all of them. You might need to train or hire agents to get the coverage you want.
- Of the skills you've decided you need, what is the most logical way to categorize them? These categories will become your skill types. Does thinking about categories of skills lead you to consider using skills you hadn't considered yet?
Creating a skill type
You must create at least one skill type before you can add skills. You can create up to 10 skill types.
To create a skill type
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
- On the Skills page, click the New skill type button.
- Enter a unique name for the skill type. Names cannot exceed 96 characters.
- Press Enter to save the skill type.
Adding skills
After you've created one or more skill types, you can add your skills. Each skill type can contain up to 30 skills.
Be intentional about the skill types you're adding skills to. After a skill is created, you can’t move it to a different skill type. Instead, it must be recreated in the skill type you want it to be in.
After you've added your first skill to a skill type, a Skills ticket field is added to tickets and visible to admins. If you want agents to be able to see or modify skills on tickets, see Configuring who can see the skills ticket field.
To add a skill to a skill type
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
- Find the skill type you want to add a skill to and click New skill.
- Enter a name for the new skill and press Enter.
Names can't exceed 96 characters and must be unique within a skill type. Skills in separate skill types can have the same name, but we recommend against it.
Managing the skills assigned to agents
Each skill must be assigned to at least one agent. Admins can assign skills to all agents and other admins. On Enterprise plans, agents in custom roles with the View user profile list and Skills permissions can assign skills to other agents.
There are two ways you can assign skills to agents:
Assigning skills to agents from the Skills page
Use the Skills page to manage agents assigned to skills when you add a new skill or need to assign multiple agents to a skill. You can select up to 50 agents at a time to add or remove from a skill.
To assign a skill to agents using the Skills page
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
- Click the skill you want to add agents to.
- Under Agents, click Manage.
- In the Manage agents for skill dialog, select the agents you want to assign to
the skill. You can select up to 50 agents at a time. To locate agents:
- Scroll through the list of agents.
- Enter an agent's name in the search box
- Click the options menu icon (
) and select the group name to filter by group
As you select agents, their names appear in the Agents with skill list.
- Click Save.
To remove agents from a skill using the Skills page
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
- Click the skill you want to add agents to.
- Under Agents, click Manage.
- In the Agents with skill list, click the delete icon (x) next to the name of the agent you want to remove from the skill.
- Click Save.
Assigning skills to agents from the agent's profile
Use the agent's profile to manage skill assignments if you need to add multiple skills to a single agent or when you're onboarding a new agent.
To assign skills to an agent's profile
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Find the agent's name, click the options menu icon (
) on that row, and select Manage in Support.
- In the Skills field in the left sidebar, select the skills from the
dropdown list.
To remove skills from an agent’s profile
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Find the agent's name, click the options menu icon (
) on that row, and select Manage in Support.
- In the Skills field, click the delete icon (x) next to the skill you want to remove.
56 comments
Rafael Santos
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.
2
Jeana
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
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
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.
1
Barry Neary
Hi Harper Dane
We are developing the ability to change skills on each ticket update and are planning a release in July
Barry
3
D.Fitz
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.
0
Barry Neary
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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D.Fitz
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.
0
Barry Neary
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?
0
karankuwarbidxb
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
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?
0
Tim
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?
0
Barry Neary
Hi Tim, yes - there is a skills api documented here
0
D.Fitz
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
Hi D. Fitz
If you click on the gear icon in skills page, you can set whether agents can view or edit their skills:
1
D.Fitz
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
Hi D Fitz
It also controls whether skills appear on the agent profile and whether they are editable or not by the agent
0
D.Fitz
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.
0
Henrique
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
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
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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Henrique
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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D.Fitz
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
thank you for your feedback and sharing that information with us. We really appreciate it.
Best,
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Bobby Koch
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
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
0