Q Skills
- Josh Daugherty (Deactivated)
Skills-based routing is an inherent call center functionality of the Sharpen platform. Skills are assigned per agent or user group, but skills are not independent of a user group. When multiple skills are assigned to an interaction, the system will attempt to route the call to an available agent who possesses all of those skills. If there is not an agent available who matches all of those skills, the call will then be passed to the available agent who matches the MOST of those skills.
QSkills are tags attached to an interaction and are designed to help Sharpen Q find the best agent (e.g., for a specific product or language). Skills can be applied to inbound routes and/or Auto Attendants. Unless specified as a required skill, skills are set as a preference. This means that if no agents are available with the corresponding skill, routing follows the standard flow (e.g., if no one is available for Spanish skill, the system will then try to route the interaction as though the Spanish skill was not applied). This ensures that the customer gets to an agent rather than waiting indefinitely.
Skills are also assigned a weight of 1 or more—with no upper limit. This allows the system to determine which assigned skills are most important by prioritizing interactions with the highest weighted total.
For prioritizing interactions between multiple queues, refer to Q Weights (Admin > Sharpen Q > [Queue Name] > Edit).
It is important to note that all extensions automatically have what is known as an sagent ("s agent") skill. These skills display as “sagent + agent extension + con(company number).” In order to receive interactions within a Q, the agent must have the correct sagent skill for his/her extension, so don’t delete it).
Creating a New Skill
To create a new skill, click the New Skill button. Then, name your skill and assign a weighted point total. If you want to assign your skill to an agent, check the box next to the agent name.
In order to apply your skill to an interaction, you’ll need to attach the skill via Configuration > Inbound routes or Configuration > Auto Attendant.
Then, enable Skills-Routing in the corresponding queue. (Admin > Configuration > Sharpen Q).
Creating Required Skills
When enabled, required skills route interactions only to agents that are assigned the same skill. While this may cause wait times to spike in certain areas, this is can be beneficial when you definitively want certain agents to handle certain interactions. Create required skills by putting “REQUIRED” and an underscore (e.g. REQUIRED_Spanish) for the skill name.
Note: It is incredibly important that you capitalize the word REQUIRED— otherwise, the skill will not be recognized as a required skill.
You’ll also need to enable Required Skill Routing in the Q Settings found in (Admin > Configuration > Sharpen Q).
Assigning an Existing Skill to Multiple Users
If you are assigning skills to multiple users, we would highly recommend creating a user group. This allows you quickly and easily change preferences and skills for all members of the group.
Find the skill you want to assign, then click the edit button to the right. This will take you to the edit screen where you can adjust the skill Name, Weight, and Agents with the assigned skill. Check the box next to the agent name to assign the skill to the agent.
If you are trying to add multiple skills to a single user, you can do so in Admin > Settings > Manage Users > AgentName.