Skills-based routing: What it is + how it works + types

It can be difficult to maintain complex workflows with large support teams. In an ideal world, your team could distribute tickets to the most qualified agents easily and efficiently. Unfortunately, businesses may use costly and time-consuming routing methods without the right tools.

Skills-based routing is a ticket management strategy businesses can use to streamline the ticketing process. This guide details how this process works, the types of routing you can use, and how it contributes to a positive customer experience (CX).

More in this guide:

• Why do businesses need skills-based routing?
• How does skills-based routing work?
• Types of skills-based routing
• How to set up skills-based routing in your organization
• Frequently asked questions
• Route your way to success with Zendesk

Why do businesses need skills-based routing?

Whether you’re running a busy contact center, a small business support team, or a call center, skills-based routing can make a difference for you. Here are some reasons you should adopt SBR.

Better agent productivity

Businesses can use SBR to improve agent productivity and provide efficient customer service. With this system, support reps spend most of their time solving customer requests in their specialized fields. This leads to happier and more productive agents because they can get straight to solving problems rather than rerouting tickets.

Increased customer satisfaction

Customers want answers as fast as possible, and skills-based routing can help speed up the support process. When you route customers to support representatives who can expertly resolve their concerns, they receive faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive support.

If teams need to escalate the ticket, SBR can also assist in ensuring the customer is routed to the right agent. This creates a more streamlined experience, boosting customer satisfaction.

Improved customer service metrics

With SBR, customers are strategically matched with agents with the most relevant skills—leading to improved efficiency and customer service metrics. Some of these include:

• First contact resolution (FCR)
• Average handle time (AHT)
• Customer effort score (CES)

• Ticket reopens

If you have a customer service metric you need to improve, SBR can likely help you reach your goal.

Lower operational costs and higher profit margins

Skills-based routing can help lower costs and increase profit in a few different ways:

• Speeding up time to resolution so you can scale your customer support team without raising payroll expenses

• Reducing the need for agents to route tickets manually, which can easily be a full-time job

• Routing higher-priority conversations and VIP customers to agents with more specialized knowledge—opening the door for upselling opportunities and reducing churn.

Removing complex ticket triaging processes frees up time and energy agents would otherwise spend assigning and routing support requests. When your routing process is more efficient, your bottom line will prosper.

How does skills-based routing work?

Skills-based routing works by matching customers to agents with the most relevant skill set to resolve an issue.

The SBR process exists within a ticketing system. First, the system administrator notes business needs and agent skills and then assigns agents to the skill groups that apply to them. An administrator must then set up routing rules and configurations to ensure inbound support tickets go to an agent with the appropriate skills.

You can base these skill groups on factors critical to your organization, such as:

• Language: Some common languages a support team may encounter include English, Spanish, Mandarin, German, and Arabic. Assign agents who speak these languages appropriately.
• Location: If you operate in different time zones or use a follow-the-sun model for support, you’ll want agents on call who match your customers’ time zones.
• Subject matter expertise: Agents who are well-versed in your product or have a formal education in a subject area may be better suited for particular tasks.
• Experience: Agents who have had time to build their expertise will likely be an asset in providing good customer service.

Whether you use these skills or others, finding the best fit for your process is important.

Types of skills-based routing

Skills-based routing utilizes three strategies that work in harmony to create a comprehensive support structure. Here are the types of SBR.

Standalone skills-based routing

Standalone skills-based routing is exactly what it sounds like—routing tickets based on agent skill. Just like other methods, this starts by categorizing agents based on skill groups, such as product knowledge, language, location, and experience. From there, standalone SBR routes customer support tickets to the appropriate agent.

Omnichannel skills-based routing

Omnichannel routing allows you to direct customer tickets across various channels—including email, phone, and messaging apps—to agents based on their availability, capacity, and conversation priority.

Conversation priority skills-based routing

This type of routing prioritizes tickets based on the nature of the conversation. High-priority ticket criteria typically include:

• Individuals with high customer lifetime value (CLV)

• At-risk customers

• Relationship-dependent customers

Teams can also use automation to assess factors like previous interaction history, language, customer demographics, and more to determine if it should push a support request to the front of the queue.

How to set up skills-based routing in your organization

Here are some of our top SBR best practices and ticketing system tips to help you implement skills-based routing in your organization. Follow these tips to maximize productivity and boost customer satisfaction.

1. Identify the skills you need

First, determine the skills you want to prioritize in your support team. Some specific skills that you may find relevant to your organization include:

• Language: spoken and written language proficiency for multilingual agents
• Communication: adept communicators who can resolve complex issues and de-escalate situations
• Technical skills: compliance, troubleshooting, programming, and more
• Aptitude: the scope of abilities, skill level, and propensity for solving topical problems
• Experience: internal training and time with your company

Then, think about what sets your incoming calls and tickets apart. Consider the types of inquiries your company receives from customers, the difficulty of the questions you receive, and your customer service key performance indicators (KPIs).

2. Document agent skills

After defining your most important skills, take a quick headcount of members on your team who can perform them. This information is essential to creating ticket conditions and ensuring you have enough agent coverage to handle high-volume support tickets, especially for tricky or technical topics.

For example, let’s say you have only a handful of support agents who can handle technical requests and dozens of others trained to handle standard support questions. In this situation, you don’t want your few experts to get bogged down by tickets outside their expertise.

3. Create an organizational chart

Once you document agents’ skills, create an organizational chart using slides or a spreadsheet. This can keep your staff and their skills and responsibilities organized as the system administrator establishes routing rules and assigns agents to skill groups.

Create a comprehensive organizational chart by including the following:

• Employee names

• Contact information

• Job descriptions and primary responsibilities

• Skill sets

Add or replace other variables based on your team and your organizational needs.

4. Add skills to skill types

At this stage, your primary concern is category organization. After you decide on your skill types, you can create the specific skills.

Here are some examples of what this looks like:

• If “French” is a skill, the associated skill type is “language.”

• If “PCI security certified” is a skill, the associated skill type is “compliance.”

Identify the most important skills and organize them accordingly.

5. Assign agents to skills

Now that you’ve formally selected your skills, assign support agents to these categories. When doing this, set routing goals that make sense for your unique business. You can base this on the following:

• Most efficient workflow

• User needs

• Urgency

• Organizational structure and staffing capacity

Once you assign agents who specialize in a specific skill to a category, you may also want to add a rep who’s working on growing their knowledge. This can help them hone their support superpowers or be a fail-safe when there isn’t enough skills-based coverage.

6. Set routing rules and triggers

When you have all the information you need regarding agent skills, set up ticket routing triggers and rules.

Consider customizing:

• Rules: Customize existing rules or make your own to streamline internal workflows.
• Triggers: Determine what actions should happen when a specific event occurs.
• Ticket dissemination: Choose between pushing tickets to support agents automatically or manually or allowing agents to select their own tickets.

You can add more rules and triggers based on your business’s needs.

Frequently asked questions

Route your way to success with Zendesk

Skills-based routing is a critical process that helps support teams solve customer inquiries as efficiently as possible. That said, your software is just as important as your strategy. Zendesk routing capabilities help businesses direct conversations to the right agent, keep them organized, and—most importantly—ensure their operations run smoothly.

Explore our service capabilities to see how Zendesk can make a difference in your customer support operations.