Understand Skills-Based Routing

Sita likes what she sees in queue-based routing, but Ursa Major recently expanded sales of solar panels to Mexico and Canada, and Sita thinks she might need more sophisticated controls. She wants Omni-Channel to route customer cases to agents who speak the customer’s preferred language and who have the right knowledge to solve the issue. For example, if a customer who speaks Spanish has a problem with their bill, then Sita wants Omni-Channel to assign the case to an agent who speaks Spanish and understands the billing system.

Sita asks Maria to investigate skills-based routing for Omni-Channel.

Skills-based routing looks at the skills required to complete a work item (requested skills) and matches these to the skills that are assigned to the agent (agent’s skills). Omni-Channel routes the work to the first agent who has the required skills and who is available (that is, has the capacity to take the work item). Work items can have multiple skills, and agents can have multiple skills.

To route work by skills, use a setup flow to define mappings between work-item field values and skills. Create one skill mapping set for each object. Skills-based routing rules support case, chat transcript, contact request, lead, messaging session, order, social post, and custom objects.

When Omni-Channel receives a new work item, it looks at the required skills, the work’s priority, and the routing model (Least Active or Most Available) to determine how to route the work.

Ursa Major Solar is supporting customers in three countries who use a variety of products, and those customers have a wide range of needs. Maria confirms that skills-based routing would let Ursa Major Solar’s contact center route work to the best agent for the job—improving the quality of customer service.

Identify Which Skills Agents Need To set up skills-based routing, you need a list of the skills that agents must have to resolve different work items. Talk with your contact center to find out what those are.

Maria talks to Ursa Major Solar’s support managers. She learns that the company needs agents who possess language skills, technical skills to troubleshoot solar panels, and business skills to resolve issues with orders and billing. Here’s the list she makes.

Create Service Resources for Agents
Service resources represent individual agents. Maria creates a service resource for each agent.

1. From the App Launcher, find and select Service Resources.
2. Click New.
3. Enter the following values:
   • For Name, enter the name of the agent.
   • Select the Active checkbox. A service resource must be active to receive work items.
   • For User, use the lookup icon to select the agent.
   • For Resource Type, select Agent.
4. Click Save.

Assign Skills to Agents
Assign skills to your agents to track their areas of experience and their level of proficiency for each skill. For an agent to receive work, the agent must be assigned every skill specified in the routing configuration, no matter the skill level. Here’s how Maria assigns skills to Ursa Major Solar’s agents.

1. From the App Launcher, find and select Service Resources.
2. Click the service resource that you just created.
3. Select the Related tab.
4. Scroll to the Service Resource Skills section and click New.
5. Select a skill. You can optionally enter a skill level 1 (novice) – 10 (expert).
6. Enter a start date, and if needed, an end date. For example, if an agent must be recertified in a particular skill every 6 months, enter an end date that’s 6 months later than the start date.
7. Click Save.
   
   The service resource’s skill now appears in their Skills related list.

Define Skills-Based Routing Rules
To route work by skills, define the mappings between work-item field values and skills. Create one skill mapping set for each object.

1. From Service Setup, enter Skills-Based Routing Rules in the Quick Find box, then select Skills-Based Routing Rules.
2. Click New Skill Mapping Set.
3. Provide a name and developer name for the mapping set and select the type of object to be routed. Then click Next.
4. Select the fields to use for routing your cases. Then click Next.
5. For each field, select the field value and corresponding skill.
   
   You can also specify a skill level and set skills to additional. For additional skills, you can specify the order in which skills are dropped if after the specified timeout no agent with that skill is available.
   
   
6. When you have mapped field values to skills for each field, click Done.