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Understand skill-based routing

Last Update: Nov 2024 • Est. Read Time: 2 MIN
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Skill-based routing allows you to send conversations to agents who are best qualified to work with a customer. A skill can be defined as specialized knowledge of an area of your product, language fluency, or working with a particular customer profile, such as customers in a preferred program. 

With skills-based routing, you can:

  • Reduce handling time by ensuring that agents with the right skills address inquiries.
  • Enhance agent productivity by ensuring they focus on their areas of expertise.
  • Increase customer satisfaction by reducing wait times and offering a more personalized experience.
  • Help optimize agent workload by leveraging skills appropriately across teams.
Who can access this feature?
User typesAdmins can access the Routing page.


In this article

What is a skill?

A skill is an area of expertise an agent has that makes them the best qualified to assist a customer. Skills can include an agent's expertise in a specific product area, language fluency, or a certain type of interaction, such as billing questions.

Key terms

Here are some important terms to know before you get started with skills-based routing:

  • Skills
    Unique attributes or competencies assigned to agents, such as language fluency, technical expertise, or familiarity with a product area.

  • Skill rules
    Rules that direct conversations to agents based on the required skills. These rules allow you to set routing criteria tied to agent skills.

  • Queue rules
    Criteria that initially sort conversations into queues based on factors like language, channel, or company information.

  • Standard skill
    Conversations with standard skills are assigned to agents with the specified skill whenever possible. If no agent with the skill is available, the conversation may be routed to another available agent.

  • Required skill
    Conversations with required skills are only assigned to agents with that skill unless a timeout period passes, allowing assignment to other agents if needed. Timeout periods are optional. If a timeout period is not set, the conversation will only be routed to an agent with that skill.

How does skill-based routing work?

When a conversation comes into Kustomer, it first goes through queue rules and is assigned to a queue. Once in a queue, the conversation is matched to an agent with the relevant skill using the skill rule. If an agent with the skill is unavailable, the conversation is routed to the first available agent.

Note: If you created a Required skill, the conversation will only be routed to an agent with that skill unless you set a timeout period.

Set up skills-based routing

You can set up skills-based routing by going to Settings > Platform > Routing and selecting the Skills tab. See this tutorial to learn how to Assign a conversation to an agent based on skill.

Reporting on skils

Kustomer offers two reports that allow you to get more insight into how skills are performing:

  • The Team Pulse dashboard provides a real-time view of how conversations routed by skills are assigned.
  • The Routing report shows historical information on how skills have performed over time.