Workflow: Using skills to route calls to specific agents

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This article assumes omnichannel routing has been turned on for your account. See Turning on omnichannel routing and Managing your omnichannel routing configuration.

It is common for agents to have special skills. Often, one of those skills is the relationship and expertise they have with certain customers. This workflow example shows how you can leverage skills in omnichannel routing to route calls from specific customers to the particular agent responsible for the customer.

This recipe uses omnichannel routing, skills, and triggers.

This example includes:

• Workflow goal
• Use tags to identify all tickets from a customer
• Defining the customer as a skill
• Using a trigger to assign the skill to incoming calls
• Configuring omnichannel routing skills settings

Workflow goal

Your company assigns agents to support specific customers. This enables them to build a strong relationship with the customer and develop unique expertise to help them meet the customer's needs. You want to use omnichannel routing to route calls from customers to the agents responsible for their accounts.

Using omnichannel routing for calls

Before deciding how to route calls, it's important to understand the ticket creation process. When you use omnichannel routing, a ticket is created for the call as soon as it enters the queue. That means you can run triggers on incoming calls before it is answered. If you choose not to use omnichannel routing, tickets are created for calls after the call is answered by an agent, and triggers can't be run against the incoming calls until the ticket is created. That means omnichannel routing is the only way you can use triggers to influence call routing.

See How omnichannel routing works.

Use tags to identify all tickets from a customer

By adding a tag to all user profiles associated with a single customer account, you'll be able to use that tag to identify all tickets from the customer and route them accordingly.

To identify and tag user profiles associated with a customer

• Open the user profile and add a CustomerName tag to the end user's profile, where CustomerName is the customer or account name. For example, Customer1.

Use unique tags for each customer account. If you add the same tag to multiple user profiles, tickets from all of those users are tagged the same for routing purposes.

Defining the customer as a skill

There are three parts to creating new skills: create a skill type, add skills to the skill type, and assign the skills to agents. Before doing this, it's a good idea to make sure you understand what skills are and how they can be used.

To define the customer as a skill

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Skills.
2. Create a skill type named Customers.
3. Add each customer name as a skill within the Customers skill type. For example, Customer 1 and Customer 2.
4. While adding each skill, under Agents, click Mangage and assign each agent responsible for the customer.

   Each skill must be assigned to at least one agent.

Using a trigger to assign the skill to incoming calls

After you create skills and assign them to agents, you have to create a process for assigning the skills to incoming calls. The best way to do this is via triggers, which can be used to manage skills when the ticket is created or updated. See Adding and managing skills on tickets.

To create a trigger that adds the customer skill to a call

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
2. Create or edit a trigger.
3. Under Conditions, specify the conditions under which you want the skill to be added. For example:
   • Ticket > Channel > Is > Phone call (incoming)
   • Ticket > Tag > CustomerName (where CustomerName is the tag of the customer or account, such as Customer1)

   See Building trigger condition statements.

4. Under Actions, select Add skills or Set skills and then select the individual customer skill you want to assign, such as Customer1.

   See Building trigger action statements.

5. For each skill you select, specify a priority:
   • Required: Skills that never expire. Agents must have all required skills to be assigned the ticket by omnichannel routing.
   • Optional: All optional skills are subject to the skill timeout defined in the omnichannel routing configuration. When skills timeouts occur, omnichannel routing ignores optional skills in order of priority (low to high) when looking for available agents. Select Optional (Low priority), Optional (Medium priority), or Optional (High priority).
6. Click Save.

Configuring omnichannel routing skills settings

As soon as you create skills and start assigning them to agents and tickets, they can influence routing. However, omnichannel routing won't consider skills until you turn it on in your routing configuration.

To configure omnichannel routing to consider skills

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Routing configuration.
2. On the Routing Configuration page, click Edit next to the Initial routing configuration.
3. On the Initial routing configuration page, select Turn on skills-based routing.
4. (Optional) We recommend you also select Turn on skills timeout and specify skill timeout thresholds for each channel. When configured, optional skills are dropped from the routing criteria in order of priority from low to high, making it more likely for omnichannel routing to find an available agent.

When you use the configurations described in this article, calls from specific customers are routed directly to the agent or agents responsible for the customer account.