To use skills for routing purposes, they must be assigned to tickets. We recommend that you use triggers to automatically evaluate new or updated tickets and add skills, but you can also use routing rules to apply skills at ticket creation or manually add or remove skills at any time.
For information about who can see the skills field on tickets, see Viewing a ticket's skills.
Assigning skills to tickets
A ticket must have at least one skill assigned to it if you want it to be routed to an agent based on skills. The best way to do this is using triggers or routing rules, so that skills are automatically added to tickets meeting the specified criteria, but they can also be added or adjusted manually.
Even when skills are added automatically, it's important to make sure tickets without skills are also assigned to agents. Omnichannel routing handles this seamlessly, by considering skills if they are present, but otherwise assigning tickets based on priority and agent availability. For standalone skills-based routing, you may want to define a view specifically for tickets without skills. You should also consider if there is a missing skill or skill condition that would have resulted in a skill being assigned to a ticket.
There are three ways you can add skills to tickets:
Using triggers to add skills to tickets (recommended)
When omnichannel routing is turned on, you can use triggers to assign skills to tickets because they can add skills when tickets are updated as well as when they're created. Additionally, the skills actions for ticket triggers also allow you to specify the priority of the skills for routing purposes. Skills marked as required can't time out and are always part of the criteria for routing the ticket to an agent, but optional skills stop being considered for routing purposes when a skills timeout occurs. Trigger actions related to skills are available when you have created at least one skill. For more information, see the Triggers conditions and actions reference.
Omnichannel routing only recognizes skills added to tickets for calls when the ticket is created and the first time triggers fire on the ticket. Any updates made to the ticket's skills after that initial creation process aren't considered by the routing logic, but can be used by other business rules.
To configure a trigger to add skills to tickets
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
- Create or edit a trigger.
- Under Conditions, specify the conditions under which you want the skills to be added.
- Under Actions, select Add skills and then select the individual skills to be added. See Building trigger action statements.
- For each skill you select, specify a priority:
- Required: Omnichannel routing considers only agents with required skills eligible to receive the tickets.
- Optional: Optional skills are subject to the skills timeout defined in the omnichannel routing configuration. When a skills timeout occurs, omnichannel routing ignores all optional skills when looking for available agents.
Note: Each skill that is dropped from consideration increases the number of agents eligible to receive the ticket and, in turn, increases the likelihood of it being assigned. - Click Save.
Using routing rules to add skills to tickets
If you choose not to use omnichannel routing and triggers to assign skills to tickets, you'll need to define conditions for each skill that determine which tickets they're applied to. These sets of conditions are called routing rules. When a ticket is created that meets the conditions defined in a skill's routing rule, that skill is attached to the ticket. Routing rules are applied only upon ticket creation, which means:
- If a ticket is created before a routing rule is set up, it won't have that skill attached to it.
- 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.
- If a ticket is updated so that it meets the conditions for a new skill, the ticket will not start to require that new skill until you manually add it to the ticket.
To create a routing rule
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
- Click the skill you want to add a routing rule for.
- Under Tickets > All of the following conditions or Any of the following conditions, click Add condition.
- Select a condition, a field operator, and a value.
- (Optional) Repeat these steps until you've added all of the conditions for the skill.
- Click Save.
To edit a routing rule
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
- Click the skill you want to modify the routing rules for.
- Under Tickets, click the delete icon (x) next to each skill you want to remove.
- Click Save.
Manually adding skills to tickets
In addition to automatically adding skills to tickets using triggers and routing rules, admins and agents with permission can also manually add or update skills on tickets at any time.
To manually add skills to a ticket
- In Support, open the ticket.
- Under the Skills field, use the dropdown so select the skills you want to add.
- Click Submit.
Removing skills from a ticket
You can use triggers to remove skills from tickets when they are created or updated. You can also remove skills from tickets manually at any time.
For calls, omnichannel routing only recognizes the skills on a ticket immediately after the ticket is created and the triggers fire initially. The routing logic won't consider skills that are changed or removed after that point.
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
- Create or edit a trigger.
- Under Conditions, specify the conditions under which you want the skill to be removed.
- Under Actions, select Remove skills and then select the individual skills to be removed. See Building trigger action statements.
- Click Save.
To manually remove skills from a ticket
- In Support, open the ticket.
- Under the Skills field, click the x icon next to the name of the skill you want to remove.
- Click Submit.
Understanding how skills are applied to follow-up tickets
When a follow-up ticket is created for a closed ticket, you may notice that skills on the follow-up ticket don't always match the skills on the original ticket. Generally, when a follow-up ticket is created, it inherits data from the original ticket (see Creating a follow-up for a closed ticket). Skills are an exception to this rule.
Follow-up tickets don't inherit skills. Instead, skills are applied to the follow-up ticket based on your triggers or routing rules when the follow-up ticket is created.
18 comments
Rafael Santos
Adding and removing skills on Triggers? This is amazing news! Congrats Barry Neary and team 🙌
When will it become available?
Having these will allow for many new options when using Skills routing without requiring updates via API.
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Barry Neary
Hi Rafael
We have started rolling this out today - it may take a few days before your account is enabled
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Barry Neary
Hi Ahmed Zaid (cc: Rohan Gupta)
We are working on this - the plan is to have the ability to add a tag to a Talk ticket for each IVR button press and then triggers can add skills based on these tags
Barry
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Chris Stewart
Maybe I'm missing something here but the suggestion above is to delete any of the old 'routing rules' for skills and replace with Triggers - But there is no option to Add Skills via triggers, unless there are Skills defined in Routing Rules?
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Barry Neary
Hi Chris Stewart
In the skills area there are two main areas shown when you click on a skill:
1) The conditions area: where you can setup conditions to add a skill when ticket is created
2) The agent assignment area - where you assign the skills to agent (s)
With the introduction of skills on triggers, you can use triggers now to add skills to a ticket rather than using 1)
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Dusan Basic
I followed the suggestion above but still can't find "Add Skills" under "Actions" in Triggers.
I created a skill in the Skills section and used only the agent assignment area. Then I tried adding a trigger to assign the skill but there was no option "Add Skills" under "Actions" in Triggers.
Am I missing something?
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Barry Neary
Hi Dusan Basic
Have you switched omnichannel routing on? It must be on for you to see this
Barry
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Dusan Basic
Barry Neary omnichannel routing was not on. Now it works :) Thanks for the quick response!
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Devan La Spisa
Thanks, Barry Neary for the help!
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Pascal Turmel
Omnichannel routing is not working for us + We cannot see “Custom Agent Status” either. "Queues" appears in our Prod Environment but not on the Sandbox…. so not impressed so far… in terms of config, Skills are being assigned correctly to tickets, Omni Channel is on, Trigger tag added to autoroute specific simple email ticket upon reception, Engineer assigned to groups with same skills as updated in tickets… but tickets sit there into our New and Unassigned Queue without the feature to actually work… Any ideas?
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Pascal Turmel
Can someone please assume identity and show me what is wrong in our set up..? I am running out of patience here and cannot understand why this does not work (after reading all your doc and videos training)
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Pascal Turmel
Any news? We cannot make the feature to work with a very basic set up
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Paolo
I hope you're doing well. I'm sorry for any trouble this may have caused. I see that you've already submitted two tickets to our Support Team, and they are actively working on it internally. Our agents will provide you with updates as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
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Shaun Murray
Hello all! I have a support ticket open but I seem to be repeating myself to them with little progress, so I'm hoping to get some advice here.
I have a trigger that adds a skill to a call's ticket when it is assigned to a specific group (tech support). I also have a trigger that removes the skill when the call is unassigned from that group (say, to transfer it to billing support). The problem is, that even though the skill is removed from the call's ticket, the call still will not route to agents without the skill. Is that how it is expected to work?
If that is how it is expected to work, what is the point of this section? Removing skills from a ticket
1
Sara Bradley-Bussell
Shaun Murray we have run into the same issue with skills and calls - once a skill fires on a call ticket, skills won't be considered again even if they are changed or removed. We had to do away with omnichannel routing for calls entirely given that tickets generated by voicemails can't be routed by omnichannel either which is a huge pain point for our teams.
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Tony
thank you for sharing your setup with us and for your feedback. We appreciate your input and will keep it in mind as we move forward. Your feedback is invaluable to us and helps us improve our products and services. We always strive to consider our customers' ideas.
Best,
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test.zendesk
HI,
It's nice to see the feature that allows us to make certain skills required even after a skill timeout is enabled for certain channels.
I tried setting one of the skills as required with the help of the trigger but the ticket with that required skill still got assigned to the agent who didn't have the skill to handle it, Could you please help identify what could have caused it? The ticket number is #13145995
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Barry Neary
Hi test.zendesk
I have answered on the ticket
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