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Skills-Based Routing

Skills-based routing automatically assigns tickets to the agent whose skills best match the ticket’s requirements. This ensures complex issues reach qualified agents while balancing workload across the team.

How it works

  1. Define skill types — Create categories like “Language”, “Product Area”, or “Technical Level”
  2. Create skills — Add specific skills under each type (e.g. “Spanish”, “Billing”, “API Integration”)
  3. Assign agent skills — Give each agent skills with a proficiency level (1-5) and priority (primary or secondary)
  4. Tag tickets with skills — Skills can be added manually, by triggers, automations, or AI detection
  5. Routing engine matches — When a ticket needs assignment, the engine scores agents and picks the best match

Skill types and skills

Skill types are categories that organize individual skills. Each workspace can have up to 20 skill types with up to 50 skills per type.

Example typeExample skills
LanguageEnglish, Spanish, French, German
ProductBilling, API, Dashboard, Mobile App
ExpertiseBeginner, Intermediate, Advanced

Agent skills

Each agent can have up to 100 skills assigned. For each skill, you configure:

SettingDescription
ProficiencyRating from 1 (basic) to 5 (expert). Default: 3
PriorityPrimary (1) or secondary. Primary skills are weighted higher in matching

Ticket skills

Tickets can have up to 20 skills attached. Each skill has:

SettingDescription
RequiredWhether the skill is mandatory for matching (default: yes)
SourceHow the skill was added: manual, trigger, automation, or ai

Routing algorithm

The routing engine scores each available agent using:

  • Skill match — proficiency-weighted match between ticket and agent skills
  • Primary skill ratio — agents with more primary skill matches score higher
  • Workload — agents with fewer open tickets are preferred
  • Round-robin — among equal scores, the agent least recently assigned wins

Fallback behavior

If no agent fully matches all required skills, the routing engine relaxes requirements in tiers:

  1. Full match — all required skills matched
  2. Drop secondary — only primary skills considered
  3. Partial match — best partial skill overlap
  4. Any agent — falls back to workload-based assignment

The fallback timeout is configurable (1-1440 minutes).

Enabling skills-based routing

  1. Navigate to Settings > Routing
  2. Set Routing mode to Skills
  3. Configure fallback timeout and max tickets per agent
  4. Create skill types and skills under Settings > Skills
  5. Assign skills to your agents