Agents and skills
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      1. Onboarding Guide
      2. Getting Started with Omni
      3. Agents and skills

      How do I define and apply skills for agents?

      Why skills? Creating skills. Allocating skills to agents. Skill levels.

      Why use skills?

      Skills can be defined for queues and agents. If a queue has a skill requirement, then the agent can only take calls or messages from that queue if they have the required skills.

      If all your agents can answer calls and messages from all queues, defining skills is not required. However, if you want to control which agents are offered messages (or calls) from which queues, skills let you do that.

      Creating skills

      To define a skill, in your Admin account:

      1. Go to the Inbound page.
      2. Go to the Skills subpage.
      3. Click the Create button.
      4. Type a Name for the skill.
      5. Optionally, if the name is not enough, you can add a Description.
      6. Click the Save button.
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      Allocating skills to agents

      Once you have defined at least one skill, you can begin assigning skills and skills levels to your agents. In your Admin account:

      1. Go to the Inbound page.
      2. Go to the Agent skills subpage.
      3. Search for an agent to modify if necessary.
      4. Click the mceclip2.png icon to the right of the agent’s row.
      5. Click to tick a skill the agent possesses.
      6. Allocate points to the agent’s skill level, from 1 to 10. The higher the number, the higher that agent’s skill level.
      7. Click the Save button.
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      When first setting up skills, it is best to start by allocating 1 point to each agent who has the skill. Later, you can use different skill levels to manage how calls are offered to different agents.

      Skill levels

      To be able to serve a queue, the agent must have at least one point in that queue's required skills. When creating (or editing) a queue, you can select which skills are required to serve it. You do not define a number of points required in a skill.

      For example, you cannot specify that agents must have 3 points in a skill to serve a queue.

      mceclip0.png

      In this screenshot of a call queue's settings, we have defined:

      • The agent must have points in the skills English and Publishing to take calls from that queue.
      • The agent listed in Agents who are able to serve this queue has a total of 2 points (one in each skill) and can serve this queue.

      Skill totals

      An agent’s total skill points do not affect their ability to serve a queue. As long as the agent has at least one point in the relevant skills, they will be able to take calls or accept messages.

      However, if a new call comes into a queue and two agents are both available to take it, the call will be offered first to whichever agent has the higher total points in the qualifying skills for the queue.

      That is to say, if Rob has 2 points total in the required skills and Mikko has 3 points total, when both agents are available, calls will always be offered to Mikko first.

      This has two implications:

      • You can bias queues if you have agents with specialist knowledge. By giving those agents higher skill points, it makes calls more likely to be offered to the specialist.
      • If you want all agents to be treated equally by a given queue, make sure each agent has the same total skill points in the relevant skills.