Defining agent skills for Omni

This article is part of the Implementing Omni series. The previous article is Creating or updating agents for Omni.

Creating 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.

To define a skill, in your Admin account:

Go to the Inbound page. Go to the Skills subpage. Click the Create button. Type a Name for the skill. Optionally, if the name is not enough, you can add a Description. Click the Save button.

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:

Go to the Inbound page. Go to the Agent skills subpage. Search for an agent to modify if necessary. Click the icon to the right of the agent’s row. Click to tick a skill the agent possesses. Allocate points to the agent’s skill level, from 1 to 10. The higher the number, the higher that agent’s skill level. Click the Save button.

When first setting up skills, it is best to allocate 1 point to each agent who has the skill. You can use different skill levels to manage how calls are offered to different agents.

Skill levels

When defining an Agent’s skills, we can allocate points for each, ranking them from 1 to 10.

In the above example, the agent has:

• 8 points in English
• 1 in  Finnish
• 4 in Publishing

When defining skills for a queue, you specify only that the agent must have a skill, not a required skill level. To serve this call queue, for example, the agent needs to have at least one point in the skill English, and one point in the skill Publishing.

In the list of Agents who are able to serve this queue, Each agent has a number in parentheses after their name, indicating the total points that agent has in qualifying skills.

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.

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.

Example skills

Because Example wants only experienced agents to take Gold calls, they create a Gold skill which is only given to experienced agents.

It is time to start setting up the inbound channels for your Omni environment. First read about, inbound email.