Introduction

Completed

Skill-based routing adds work requirements to the assignment decision. Instead of selecting any available queue member, unified routing compares skills attached to the work item with skills assigned to representatives.

Skills can describe product knowledge, language, certification, region, or another capability relevant to customer service work. A proficiency value indicates a representative's level for a skill. The assignment process evaluates these values together with queue membership, presence, and available capacity.

Follow a case through skill-based routing

Consider an incoming email that creates a high-priority billing case for a customer in Spain. The case requires the Billing and Spanish skills, and the billing issue requires an advanced proficiency level.

Unified routing processes the case in these stages:

1. Classify the work item: A logical classification rule evaluates case and related account or contact data. It attaches the required skills and proficiency values to the case work item. An intelligent skill finder model can predict skills from text when the organization configures and governs that model.
2. Route the work item: A route-to-queue rule sends the case to an advanced record queue, such as Priority billing cases.
3. Identify eligible representatives: The queue's assignment method evaluates members whose presence and capacity allow new work.
4. Match skills: The workstream's skill-matching algorithm compares the case requirements with each eligible representative's skills and proficiency.
5. Assign the case: Unified routing assigns the case according to the selected assignment method and matching result. With Exact Match, a case remains unassigned when no representative satisfies every skill requirement. With Closest Match, the system can assign the case to an eligible representative who doesn't have the required skills when no skilled representative is available.

Classification defines what the work requires. Representative configuration defines what each person can handle. The matching algorithm controls how closely those two sets of skills must align.

Compare exact and closest matching

A record workstream uses one of two skill-matching algorithms:

• Exact match requires a representative to have every required skill at or above the proficiency specified on the work item.
• Closest match ranks representatives by how closely their skills and proficiency align with the requirements when an exact match isn't available.

The selected algorithm affects which representatives qualify, but it doesn't replace presence or capacity checks. A representative whose skills match can still be ineligible when their presence isn't allowed or they don't have enough capacity.

Plan the configuration sequence

Configure skill-based routing in this order:

1. Create a rating model and proficiency values.
2. Create skill types and skills.
3. Configure representatives as bookable resources and assign skills with proficiency values.
4. Select the default skill-matching algorithm for the record workstream.
5. Attach required skills to work items through logical classification rules or an intelligent skill finder model.
6. Configure an assignment method that evaluates the required skills, presence, and capacity.
7. Decide whether representatives can update skills attached to their assigned work items.

Test records that produce exact matches, partial matches, and no matches. Confirm the attached skills, selected queue, assigned representative, and remaining capacity. These outcomes show whether classification, matching, and assignment work together as intended.