Default Required Skills in Dynamic Skills-based Routing

With Skills-based routing in Salesforce, you have the ability to dynamically select the best-placed support agent, to answer an incoming question.  But there may be situations where you want to have one or two required skills.  These skills should always be met. Next to other skills, where you may want to reduce their importance if no agent meets all the requirements.

Let’s take the following example:

• You implement skills-based routing for incoming emails
• Your implementation spans multiple countries
• Your implementation spans multiple languages
• Your implementation spans multiple (Case) queues, one for each country that you service

Skills-based Routing Rules

Using the out-of-the-box Skills-based Routing Rules, you may define dynamic routing of these incoming emails in Salesforce.

As there is one rules engine for all Cases, you may assign skills for country, language and potentially you think about creating a dedicated skill per queue. The reason being that you have dedicated teams in each country. So you want to get an incoming Case from France with a French agent, an incoming Case from Germany pushed to a German support agent, etc.

But, the idea of the Skills-based Routing Rule configuration is that you may reduce the required skills if a certain request is in queue too long.  This could mean that, in the end, the request from the French customer ends up with the German support agent.

So, how to fix this?

Also read

Why skills-based routing?
A brief explanation of the need for skills-based routing in your organization

Skills-based routing in Salesforce
The basics about skills based routing in Salesforce

Configuring Skills-based routing in Salesforce
Steps to make an initial configuration of skills-based routing in Salesforce

Let the skills be with you
More in-depth explanation of concepts like work distribution, routing models, capacity management

Required skills

Skills-based Routing Rules allow reducing skills requirements when no agents fulfill all needed skills.  When the request is waiting too long, this may lead to having certain expected skills completely dropped.

However, with the country example, you really expect someone in that specific country to answer the incoming question. This skill should never get dropped.

To meet this requirement, you should create separate Routing Configurations, one for each country that you support. Next you set the specific language skill as part of the individual Routing Configuration.  As the skill is set in the Routing Configuration, it will never get dropped as part of the Skills-based Routing Rule configuration.

This ensures that a question from a French customer always is pushed to a French support agent, and German customers get served by German support agents.

Chat

We described a scenario for email-to-case. But the same applies for skills-based routing for incoming chat requests. Moreover, when you implement chat in multiple Community sites, you may apply the same configuration.  Next to a fixed country skill, you possibly also want to have the chat button defined as a required skills, to ensure that the incoming request ends up in the correct team (in a given country).

Conclusion

Skills-based Routing Rules allow for lowering skill requirements when an incoming request is waiting too long.  But your business scenario may require one or multiple required skills.  You ensure this process by setting skills at the level of the Routing Configuration.

Are you interesting in implementing Skills-based Routing and/or Digital Transformation projects in you customer service team?  We’re here to help you!