About Skills-based Routing

Skills-based Routing (SBR) is an optional feature that matches the needs of contacts with agents who have the skills to best meet those needs. SBR is available for voice contacts as well as digital channel contacts. When calls arrive at an entry point, SBR classifies the calls into subsets. You can route the calls in each subset to agents who possess a required set of skills, such as language fluency or product expertise.

SBR assigns skill requirements to calls in a flow. Based on the assigned skill requirements, the calls enter a queue for distribution to agents who have matching skills. You can configure SBR in a way that removes or reduces the skill requirements of agents if an agent is not available within a time interval that is specified in the queue. For more information, see Skill Definitions. To remove or reduce the skill requirements, specify the skill relaxations in the Queue Contact activity.

SBR matches all skill requirements of contacts with the skills of agents. If one of the skill requirements of a contact is invalid because skill values are not properly defined in the flow, SBR cannot find a matching agent. In such cases, the call is routed to the longest available agent.

SBR provides the following capabilities:

  • Match skill requirements of contacts with agents who have those specific skills.

  • Add skill requirements to contacts and route contacts with the same skill requirements to a single queue. For more information, see Queue Contact activity.

  • Configure different agent teams with a set of agents to serve a queue. For more information, see Create a Queue and an Outdial Queue.

  • Map various skills to the profiles of these agents. For more information, see Agent Profiles.

In the preceding example, contact C1 requires skill A and contact C2 requires both skill A and skill B. When C2 enters the queue, it requires agents with both skill A and skill B. For best customer service, map C2 to the team that has both skill A and skill B. Do not map C2 to a team that has only skill A or skill B. If you map C2 to a team that has only skill A or skill B, C2 becomes the longest contact in the parked state.