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Ability to update Skills from macros or triggers



Posted Jul 07, 2018

It would be great to have the ability to Add/Delete Skills through macro and trigger actions. As well as, being able to use Skills in trigger conditions.

I would love to use to the new Routing Rules feature to cut down on the number of triggers used for handling ticket assignment. We currently have 5 triggers for almost all of the assignment group (web, email,  and 3 to handle follow-ups). But, there is no systematic way to handle updating a ticket's skill association when the ticket is handed off to a different set of agents.

Our teams are set up as Customer Support, Accounts Payable, Taxes, and Legal to name a few groups. I was planning to create the groups as skills. But if a ticket comes into Customer Support and needs to be transferred to Accounts Payable there is no good way to ensure the skill is updated accordingly. I was told to have the agent manually update the skill, but that isn't really a reliable solution.

Based on the current set up, the agents would have to work off Skill based views and Group based views, and there would be a lot of mismatches. Which would just lead to a lot of confusion.

 


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41 comments

Official

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi all, we are actively working on a solution for this - dont have timelines yet but when I do I will update you

Barry

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks for the detailed feedback, Stacy!

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I completely agree with this. We're trying to setup a scenario where an agent transfers a ticket to someone with a different skill. We do this kind of stuff with macros so that we can set multiple fields, leave internal comments, etc. 

If we were to use "skills" for this, our agents would have to remember to change this extra field manually, which defeats the purpose of the macro in the first place. We'll probably have to abandon our planned use of skills for that scenario.

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thank you for the feedback, Gene. 

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Agreed.  It would be nice to auto add skills from a user record to a ticket via a trigger.  A trigger action that was Add Skills From current assigned user's record to ticket.

I see how skills were created to route unassigned tickets, but I could see it being useful for following/viewing tickets that have been assigned.

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I'm also hoping to use skill routing as an alternative to a bunch of near-duplicate Groups. The rigidity with which skills are automatically set (exactly once, at creation, before any triggers are applied) prevents us from implementing processes to "escalate" using skill routing, or to apply skills based on the actions of "ticket is created" triggers.

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We would also like to be able to use triggers for setting and updating skills.

We use triggers to set additional information to tickets that cannot be there on creation, and currently we cannot use that to set skills. 

Additionally, if any ticket fields are set we want to use a trigger to change the skills. 

Example:

Ticket field County has a value USA, so a USA skill is added. In reality the customer is from Canada. We would want an agent to change the ticket field value to Canada, and a trigger to catch this and update the skill.

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The ability to edit skills via triggers is very much needed in order for skill-based routing to be useful in an enterprise environment.  As it is, the feature requires a great deal of manual management and it's too easy for tickets to get lost or overlooked.  Consider the following use case:

A ticket comes in and is marked as requiring skill A.  However, on examination of the content, the agent with skill A sees that the ticket actually requires skill B.  The first agent adds skill B to the ticket (neglecting to remove skill A) and submits the changes.  The ticket is removed from the first agent's view, but will now only show up for agents with both skills A and B.  If there are no agents with this skill combination, then the ticket will not appear to any agent and there's no easy way for a manager to see that this is the case.

There needs to be a way to add/remove skills automatically as ticket properties change rather than depending on agents to accurately update the skills.

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Yeah this is essential, at least from Macro perspective. If we can't detect the skill heuristically on creation and agent needs to to set the skill manually, they should also be able to do that in a macro.

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This would also be helpful for those with existing tickets who would like to start using skills-based routing.

We'd be able to create triggers or automations to assign skills on existing tickets upon any given action (such as customer response, change of state, elapse of time, etc).

Skill assignment by macro would also be helpful in this regard, as intake agents can apply macros that initiate workflows for agents with specific skills in higher tiers.

Adding this feature would allow for a number of various creative applications of skills-based routing to suit many differ needs/cases.

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Same here. We’ve implemented skills based routing, but the fact that it only routed at ticket creation prior to triggers makes it hard to reassign it with the right skill.

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We have a service that tags our tickets after running them through an NLP model, we want to use skill based routing, but since we don't have the ability to update a skill this makes it much much harder for us to implement this in the way that we want to.  In an ideal world we can do this from the API, this is something that should absolutely be possible.

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Same as the previous comments. 

I have investigated the usage of this feature in our configuration but the fact that it is not possible to update the skills through triggers and macros will not be efficient for us.

It looks like this feature is incomplete so not efficient.

We will still use the tags and triggers (old way) until the routing skills feature is more developed.

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What is the latest here? Currently skills appear to be limited to sorting products or languages, not for setting actual skills. I need a means of setting who should get a ticket AFTER basic triage takes place.

As it stands i will have to spend my very limited dev cycles to attempt to make my own system which is a horrid waste.

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Any update on this? It would be a great feature and I am a little unclear why it's proving so difficult to implement.

 

Thx

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Great news Barry Neary

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Great to hear that this is in development. The lack of ability to use automations, triggers, and macros to updates skills has been the reason why we were not able to implement the feature.  Ideally, they would work like SLAs in that the ticket meets the conditions for the skill and it is applied (or removed) each time it is updated.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Quick question: Would you want all the skills between a ticket and an agent to match for the ticket to be routed to that agent? Or would you rather that the routing engine tries to find an agent that matches, but if it cannot find one, then assign to next available agent independent of whether the skills match?

If it is the latter, then what happens if suddenly an agent become available with skils, but the ticket at the top of the queue didnt match the agents skills - should the routing engine keep going down the queue looking for a the ticket that matches?

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@Barry Neary, I don't believe the existing matching/routing logic should change - in my opinion, this works just fine. However, it is the ability to assign/remove skills programmatically to a ticket via macros/triggers/automations/api (and use skills as conditions) that is currently lacking. At the moment, skills can only be assigned programmatically at ticket creation (via routing rules), after which they can only be updated manually, limiting their practical usability.

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I would want the skills for a ticket and the agent to match because our skills would align with other tool permissions. However, the complication I see is for managers who may have the skills but don't necessarily work the tickets themselves regularly. I would want to be able to exclude them from being matched with tickets despite having those skills/capacity.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Monica

With omnichannel routing, you can setup a capacity rule that has a maximum capacity of zero for all channels, and then allocate your supervisors to that capacity rule. In that way they will never be assigned work , even if they are online and have the right skills

Barry

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Any update on this and the timeline? This is a huge need. Thanks!

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Chris Rose

We are aiming for end of March

Barry

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I was able to make this happen.

I used Triggers, Tags, Webhooks and the API.

Working like a charm.

 

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Sal, I assume you are doing so though use of a monitoring service on ticket update? Duplicating the trigger functionality externally is possible but really too much to ask for something that should work as expected.

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Hey Ty,

When a ticket arrives via a web form, we tag it as example_type_1

Then a trigger calls the web hook I created that adds the skills using the api/v2/routing API endpoint

Here’s the API for reference
https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/ticketing/ticket-management/skill_based_routing/#set-ticket-attribute-values:~:text=Ticket%20Attribute%20Values-,POST%20%2Fapi%2Fv2%2Frouting%2Ftickets,with%20the%20specified%20attributes.,-Invalid%20or%20deleted

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Can they be changed mid ticket? Will routing update?

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Yes it just needs something to trigger off.

I.e change of a ticket field, or status etc

The problem we were having was that Agents using Skip shouldn’t see tickets that had no Skill associated on creation. This solved that.

What’s your use case?

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My staff set a topic set post ticket creation, that is the item I would like to use skill routing for in order to bring in SME for collaboration. 

The biggest issue is I cannot seem to set skills for personalized queues after ticket creation.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi,

Just to let you know we are a launching an EAP at the end of Febuary 2023 that will enable customers using omnichannel routing to route support tickets based on skills. More information to follow, but you can apply for this EAP here, or if you have any questions post them in this thread.

Barry

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