About Skills-Based Routing

Skills-Based Routing is an optional feature that matches the needs of callers with agents who have the skills to best meet those needs. When calls arrive at an entry point, they are classified into subsets that can be routed only to agents who possess a required set of skills, such as language fluency or product expertise.

Skill requirements are assigned to calls based on settings in the routing strategy for each entry point. The calls are then sent to a queue for distribution to agents who have been assigned a matching set of skills. If an agent doesn’t become available within a time interval specified in the queue routing strategy.

The overall process for implementing skills-based routing involves the following steps:

Procedure

Step 1

Define skills. Four types of skills can be defined:

  • A proficiency skill can have a value ranging from 0 to 10 that represents the agent's level of expertise in the skill. For example, you might define a skill for each language that your agents speak.

  • A boolean skill can have the value of true or false to indicate whether or not the agent has the skill. For example, to ensure that your most valuable customers get the best service, you might define a skill named PremierService and assign it with a value of true to your most experienced agents.

  • A text skill is a free-form text skill that must be matched exactly. For example, you might define a skill named Extension that will let you route a call to a specific agent's extension number based on digits entered by the caller in response to a prompt.

  • An enum skill is a named set of predefined values. For example, you might create a skill named Line of Business that can have the values Sales, Service, and Billing; or a skill named Operating System that can have the values Linux, Windows, and UNIX.

Step 2

Define skill profiles. A skill profile is a set of skills that can be collectively assigned to a team or agent. Each skill in the profile is assigned a specific value. For example, a skill of English might be assigned a high level of proficiency in one skill profile and a lower level in another profile. For more information, see Skill Profiles.

Step 3

Assign skill profiles to teams or agents. Each agent-based team can be assigned a skill profile. All agents logged in to the team will be associated with that skill profile. However, an individual agent can also be assigned a skill profile, which overrides the skill profile of the team.

For more information, see Create a Team and View the Details of a User
Step 4

Create Entry Points and Queues.

Step 5

Create a queue with channel type as Telephony.

  1. In the Contact Routing Settings, select the Queue Routing Type as Skills Based.

Step 6

Create or upload a call control script that defines how to treat the call (see Working with Call Control Scripts).

Step 7

Create an entry point and queue routing strategy. In the entry point routing strategy, you assign skill requirements to calls based on menu selections collected during call treatment defined in the call control script (see Assigning Skill Requirements to Incoming Calls). The calls are then distributed to the specified queue where they wait for an agent who has been assigned the required skills.

In the queue routing strategy, you specify options for identifying agents to service the incoming calls. If an agent with the required skills does not become available within a specified time interval, the skill requirement can be removed or reduced.

For more information, see Create an Agent Profile.

Step 8

Create an entry point routing strategy and select the flow created in #task_8D5C7447ED790FCE4BDA9DC3F597CBBB__step_i3n_nk2_b4b.

For more information, see Create a Routing Strategy.