Spending a lot of time manually routing tickets? Seeing tickets regularly routed to the wrong individuals or teams, leading to upset customers and long wait time?
If either of those are true, then skills-based routing might be just what you and your team need.
While most ticketing tools allow for skills-based routing and many of the principles remain the same across the different systems, we’re going to deep dive into Zendesk’s skills-based routing capabilities to help you implement it and reap the benefits.
What is skills-based routing?
Skills-based routing is an advanced feature offered by most ticketing software, which automates ticket assignment by matching tickets to agents with specialized skills.
By streamlining the assignment process, skills-based routing reduces response times, ensures more accurate ticket handling, and improves overall operational efficiency.
It also creates a better overall customer experience, as it means customers interact directly with agents who have the specialized skills to match their needs.
When is skills-based routing useful?
Skills-based routing is useful across many different industries, but in particular it helps larger, more complex support teams (with many agents, many products, many languages, and many tickets).
In these more complex support organizations, routing tickets manually takes up a significant amount of time, and mistakes in routing can be costly.
How does skills-based routing work in Zendesk?
Zendesk enables skills based routing by allowing you to create specific skills, such as languages, products, onboarding expertise, technical support, location, time zones and more.
These skills can be assigned to agent profiles, allowing tickets to be routed based on agent suitability. With skills-based routing, you can route tickets in two main ways:
Through omnichannel routing, where tickets are automatically sent to agents based on skills
Through standalone views, where agents manually select tickets based on assigned skills.
Zendesk supports up to 10 skill types, each with up to 30 specific skills. For example, a skill type could be Product, and the individual skills could be Product A and Product B.
When using skills-based routing, it’s crucial to ensure that tickets without assigned skills are also handled. In standalone routing, this can be solved by setting up a specific view for tickets where no specific skills apply. If you’re using omnichannel routing, this is handled automatically for you.
Keep in mind that follow-up tickets may not inherit the same skills from the original ticket. Instead, follow-up tickets are assigned skills based on existing rules when they are created.
If you’re using standalone routing, you’ll also need to set up routing rules. Skills can also be manually added to tickets by using the Skills field, and they can be set as conditions for triggers like:
Add skills
Remove skills
Set skills
For detailed steps on setting up skills, check out Zendesk’s guides on managing skills and views. Zendesk recommends two main types of views for standalone routing:
Views with skills-based conditions: Shows only tickets with assigned skills.
Views with skills-match: Displays tickets that match a specific skill.
Skills-based SLAs and Escalation Paths
Advanced skills-based routing becomes especially powerful when integrated with Zendesk’s SLA policies and a good ticket escalation process.
For example, if you have an SLA to respond to enterprise customers within an hour, and they submit a highly technical question about Product A, you can automate the routing with multiple skill assignments. The system will not only assign the <1-hour SLA, but it will also route the ticket directly to an agent skilled in that product.
If the SLA is breached, it can be escalated further through automations.
For even more complex setups, consider combining triggers to create multi-tier escalations based on both agent availability and ticket complexity. For instance, a breach in the first-tier response could trigger a second, higher-priority queue with specific skill-based conditions for handling escalations.
Zendesk macros allow you to prepopulate responses based on ticket needs, improving agent efficiency.
For instance, you can create macros specifically tailored to different skill sets, such as technical support or billing, to ensure that agents have pre-prepared responses for common issues.
And here’s a pro tip to improve your escalation process: use macros to enhance your escalations, ensuring that all relevant information is included before escalating a ticket.
For instance, the macro below adds an internal comment (which the agent can fill out with relevant info), reassigns the ticket to Tier 2 Support, adds a relevant tag, and adds the current agent as a follower so they can keep tabs on the progress of the ticket.
Given all these individual steps, using a macro makes this process way more efficient and consistent.
Using skills-based routing for dynamic ticket routing
Skills-based routing helps with ticket routing (thus the name), but it works best when it’s used with Zendesk’s omnichannel routing (versus with the standalone ticket view option).
If you use the standalone ticket view option, here’s what Zendesk says about it:
“...it functions more as a way to sort incoming tickets by skills rather than actually routing them directly to agents. When you use skills as a standalone routing solution, agents rely on Views based on skills to manually assign tickets to themselves.”
It’s worth noting too that standalone skills-based routing cannot be used with Talk and Messaging tickets. If you wish to use skills-based routing for those two channels as well, then you will need to use omnichannel routing.
You can even use skills to route specific customers to particular agents. This is super helpful when you have key accounts or a business that works better to have agents build a relationship with specific customers over time.
For omnichannel routing, skills-based routing works with triggers.
Essentially, when a ticket enters the queue and matches whatever the condition is for the skill, it then assigns the ticket to the agent who has the matching skill. This can apply for both ticket creation and ticket updates. This video will guide you through the process of using triggers with omnichannel routing.
An additional feature of Zendesk skills is that you can give them the ability to “timeout”.
Basically, if a ticket cannot be assigned to an agent that has the required skills within a specified timeframe, then the optional skills are dropped and the ticket goes to the next available agent (whereas required skills do not time out).
Using weighted skills for priority routing
It’s important to remember that you won’t want to weigh all skills the same in terms of priority or importance.
For example, if you have bilingual agents who handle Spanish and Product A tickets, and several English-speaking agents who handle Product A, you can prioritize the Spanish skill based on SLA urgency.
If a Spanish ticket with a high-priority SLA (e.g. response within 1 hour) comes in, the system will assign it to a bilingual agent first. Meanwhile, English tickets without immediate SLA pressure can be routed to the English-only agents. This ensures SLA compliance while balancing the workload based on both language skills and product expertise.
Leveraging AI & machine learning for predictive routing
If you’re unable to use omnichannel routing for some reason, or just prefer to use standalone skills-based routing, but are missing some of the cooler more automated features of the omnichannel routing, then fear not.
If you have Zendesk’s Advanced AI add-on, you can now use Zendesk’s intelligent triage to set up smart filters for your tickets!
Below are some routing rules you can set to make sure the right tickets get to the agents with the right skills:
Intent rules (i.e refunds)
Language rules (i.e. English or Spanish)
Intent and Language rules (i.e. Spanish refunds)
Sentiment rules (i.e. positive or negative)
When you couple Zendesk’s Intelligent Triage with skills-based routing, not only are you getting the right agents on the right tickets, but the system will use predictive analysis to identify patterns in ticket volumes and help you adjust skill assignments before agents become overwhelmed.
It’s a powerful combination (if you’re willing to pay for the Advanced AI add-on). For a comprehensive review, check out our recent guide on the Advanced AI add-on.
Common pitfalls with skills-based routing in Zendesk
When starting out, avoid over-complicating your skills setup.
Too many skills can create confusion, making it difficult to properly route tickets or manage the system long-term. I’d recommend starting with a smaller set of core skills and gradually expanding that list based on actual demand and agent specialization.
Over-segmentation can lead to misrouting and inefficiencies, especially as agent skill sets or team structures change.Ideally, the skills you choose are also fairly static.
You may not want to set skills based on the actual performance or ability level of your agents, as this can change and can cause dissent if viewed the wrong way.
That being said, you definitely do want to pick the skills if they are product or technical experts in certain areas. Additionally, adding skills based on things like customer sizes or revenue could work for a while, but may also require more monitoring unless you use a tiered subscription model and your customers are locked in to those levels for a while.
While some of the advanced features can work really well at streamlining things, you’ll always want to be cognizant of misaligning skill priorities or overcomplicating things.
Yes, you can have multiple skills working at the same time, but too many skills and too many automations means more things can go wrong. For instance, if you weigh the wrong skills incorrectly, this can cause more delays instead of speeding things up for your customers. Or, if you set up too many triggers and tags, and one fails, it may take a lot of testing to identify what exactly has gone wrong.
Skills-based routing makes your support machine run more efficiently
Zendesk’s skills-based routing is a powerful tool to make your support team more efficient.
Take advantage of Zendesk’s built-in AI options to get full benefit from the platform. By implementing, monitoring, and adjusting your skills-based routing approach in Zendesk, you’ll position your team to deliver superior customer satisfaction and foster a more engaged workforce.
If you don’t have the budget for Zendesk’s Advanced AI add-on, or if you’d just like to explore other options, check out the Triggers+ChatGPT app on the Zendesk Marketplace. It leverages ChatGPT and a no-code interface to automatically categorize, translate, and streamline your workflows — including routing tickets based on the content of your customer conversations. You can start a 14-day free trial today!
Written by Mark Sherwood Mark is an experienced customer experience leader and CX consultant, specializing in developing CX teams and innovative CX strategies. |