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About using skills to route tickets



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Jacquelyn Brewer

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Nov 11, 2024


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45 comments

Great article thank you so much.

The point above says:

I could be wrong but this is a little confusing to me...or maybe a touch misleading.

AFAIK, a call will not sit in a queue until the wait time is reached. It will sit in a queue as long as there's at least one available agent still to be offered the call.

For example:

  • I have a queue wait time of 20 mins.
  • I have 3 Talk agents in the queue
  • 1 Agent is on an active call
  • The other 2 Agents are not on calls

If a call enters the queue, the call will be offered to agent 1. If agent 1 declines or misses the call it will be offered to agent 2. If agent 2 declines or misses the call, the call will wait in the queue until agent 3 becomes available (finishes their current call). The call will then be offered to agent 3.

Let's say that the incoming call already offered to agents 1 and 2 has been waiting in the queue for 5 minutes until agent 3 becomes available. The call is offered to agent 3 but agent 3 also declines or misses the call.

As I understand it, the call will not wait in the queue for the remainder of the timeout period (20 mins) and instead will go to Voicemail (if configured) or the next step in the queue (overflow etc etc). This is because the call has been offered to all agents in the queue but none have accepted the call. (ie: the call will not be re-offered to agents it has already been offered to and declined/missed by those agents)

So in this scenario, the call is only in the queue for 5 mins, not the queue timeout period, before going to the next point in the flow as all agents in the queue have declined or missed the call.

Have I understood that correctly? Or maybe it's different when using Omnichannel routing - which would be awesome.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

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Rohan Gupta

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Chad,

We have indeed improved this functionality with Omnichannel routing.

In the case mentioned - rather than the call going to voicemail after trying all the available agents, it will keep on getting routed in the round robin fashion to available agents till the maximum queue waiting time expires - increasing the chances of call getting answered. 

Article for more details.

Thanks

Rohan

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Hi Rohan Gupta

This is awesome.

Thanks so much for clearing this up. This is a great feature and I'll be advocating for customers to move to Omnichannel routing for sure, especially when they use Talk.

Cheers
Chad

PS: And thank you Barry Neary for passing this on and being so involved on the article comments!

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Hi,

I hope you are well.

Can you please advise if Skills Based Routing based on language is available for Talk?

When testing, it works as required if the End User profile already has the correct language in. But, what if there is no existing EU profile or they call from another number. We have found that they will go to English as our default language which is not going be as required.

Is there something we have not considered for this to work as needed?

Thanks,
D

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Jacquelyn Brewer

Zendesk Documentation Team

Dana Royle You could define triggers that looks for ticket comments containing the string "Call from: +1" or whichever country codes you might need to specify, and use those to make educated guesses about the caller's preferred language. For example, "Call from: +33" indicates the call is coming from France, so you might want to add the French language skill to that call's ticket.

Using skills in omnichannel routing to overflow calls to other agents is a workflow example that describes what the conditions might look like to assign language skills based on a call's country code more detail, and Using skills to route calls to specific agents describes the basic flow of using skills to route calls to agents. I hope this helps!

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My tier 2 support techs were set as overflow on Talk when no tier 1 techs were .available. This is especially important in the evenings when staffing is light due to call volume. Since that functionality is not supported in OCR, what is the workaround?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Stephen Whyte

The current workaround is to give a skill to the tier 1 techs (could call it 'Tier1') that they have but the tier 2 techs dont.

Then have both sets of agents in the same group. When a tier 1 call comes in, add the 'Tier1' skill and assign it to the group. Set the skill timer so that it will look for a tier 1 agent for a certain amount of time, then drop the skill and give it to the next available agent.

With the release of routing queues in Q1 this overflow will be supported without the use of skills

Barry

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Barry Neary Thanks for the reply Barry!

If I add my tier 2 techs to the tier 1 group, will they also get emails as well (based on the capacity rules of the group)? Our tiered system is setup so that our T2 & T3 techs only received escalated email requests, not initial contact emails.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Stephen, if the tier 1 tickets have 'Tier1' skill and tier 2 agents dont have that skill then they wont receive tier 1 tickets unless there are no tier 1 agents available....

One thing to be aware of, currently when you set the skills expiration timer, that will remove the skills requirement from the ticket and give it to the next available agent independent of skills. But the next available agent will need to do something  - by do something I mean solve out a ticket, or set a ticket to pending, or change status. Essentially any of these actions will tell the routing engine they are available and can be assigned a ticket on which the skills have now expired.

This is a limitation we will be fixing, so that in the future as soon as the skill expires, the routing engine will proactively check all agents to see if they can be assigned this ticket.

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Barry Neary can you clarify for me if the 'Group' that I'm adding my T2 agents to is in the People or OCR section?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Add the Tier 2 agents to the same group as Tier 1 agent in the Team-Groups area. You can give the tier 2 agents a different max capacity or the same as the tier 1 agents using the Capacity Rules section

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Following this, Barry your point about the rep needing to complete an action is precisely a struggle were facing. 

 

Currently if we have 3 agents in group with skill A, the call does not remove the skill and open up to rest of group until they complete an action (like toggle offline and back on) - this in practice is not reliable as Agents who are free are not notified in a timely matter. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jason

This is a limitation we are working on addressing. In the meanwhile, if an agent hangs up a call or does anything that affects their capacity - they should receive the call from which the skills have timed out

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Barry, what does this mean: 

if an agent hangs up a call or does anything that affects their capacity

We've tried to replicate this by having free agents change ticket statuses, but nothing seems to trigger the call. The only success we had was if an agent toggles offline/away and then back to available while a caller is in queue. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jason V

Can you create a ticket with our advocacy dept so we can take a closer look - if you can include the specific ticket id in that ticket then our engineers can look to see what happened

Barry

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Hi Barry... I will but just a note I have had multiple tickets about this, but it takes weeks and multiple back and forths to get to the same spot - no one knows about this issue. You may be the only Zendesk employee that gets this problem and the inconvenience it creates with skills/routing.

We're missing more calls than we can pick up every day due to people left in queue. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jason

Talk capacity is freed up either by:

1) A call is hung up and the wrap up time expires (if you have wrap up time configured)

2) A call is hung up (if you dont have wrap up time configured)

The ticket status doesnt affect the agents Talk capacity

Barry

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I use a combination of Language and Product based skills, however I need to Language based skills to supersede the Product skills. So if I have an English speaking agent they should not be assigned any ticket with any other language. Is the only way to do this is to have any language trigger remove the Product skill or is there something else I can do to keep the additional Product Skill as well?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Lauren
 
This feature is on the roadmap for H2 2024
 
Barry

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Barry Neary do you have an ETA on when can we expect the solution to the limitation related to the skills timeout, so that as soon as the skill expires, the routing engine will proactively check all agents to see if they can be assigned this ticket?

We just launched our CS operation using this feature, but it results in a lot of messaging tickets staying in the queue, waiting for one of the events (capacity change, status change) to happen to be assigned to an agent. It's a very negative customer experience and we decided to stop using it, until there is a fix for it.  

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

We think we can release this before end of June 2024

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

But as always, no guarantees

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I have a question about the skills timeout - where it states in the article: 

 

“However, before an agent can be considered for assignment after a skills timeout occurs, one of the following events must occur: agent status changed, agent capacity changed, the agent's group assignment changed, or the agent's maximum capacity changed.”

 

Why is this? I have confirmed it in testing, but it means that you can have agents without a match sitting available, but if they do not have a change of status etc. the call is not routed to them and the caller left in limbo. Shouldn't the call route to the first available agent straight away after a skills timeout occurs, without any status or other change. This seems like a major flaw. Is this something that will be addressed or is there a reason for the logic? 

 

Thanks, 

Steven. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Steven Hampson 

This is a known limitation that we are actively addressing and we should have a release in Q2 which means that agents will not need to ‘do something’ to be assigned the ticket once the skill is dropped

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Hi Barry Neary 

Excellent, thanks for the confirmation. That makes more sense, and good to know it will be addressed. I'll look out for further releases. :)

 

Regards, 

Steven. 

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Hi, 

I have noticed some scenarios whereby Skills are not applied to tickets (typically this is related to a missing Trigger) - I would ideally like for tickets without Skills not to be assigned to Agents. 

However, I am seeing tickets without Skills going to Agents. 

Is there a way to prevent this happening? 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Stephen

 

If a ticket doesnt have a skill then the system assumes it can be given to any agent.

 

Do all of your agents have skills? Or some do and some dont?

 

When a skill is attached to a ticket by a trigger, you could have that trigger set a tag on the ticket ‘skill_attached’. Then any ticket that doesnt have this tag is not assigned to a group?

 

Barry

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Ahmed
We are planning to introduce in Q3 ticket skills priorities, whereby you can add wheher a skill is a must have for a ticket or an optional skill. So for tickets that are going to L2, tech is a mandatory skill and language can be an optional. The optional skills will be dropped after the skills timeout occurs
Would this address your needs?
Barry

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Ahmed

 

Yes, you can use triggers to give different types of tickets different skills priorities for the same skills. So tickets bound for billing queue for example can have Spanish as must have, whereas those tickets bound for general L1 queue the Spanish skill can be nice to have

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