Currently, Zendesk only supports skills-based routing using a pull model (via Guided mode or manually pulling tickets from a skills-based view). You can now use Playlist's skills-based routing solution to automatically route tickets to agents with the required skills.

This feature is only available to customers on the Suite Professional, Suite Enterprise, Suite Enterprise Plus, and Support Enterprise plans.

How it works

When you enable Skills for the first time, the following information is synced with our server:

• Full sync of all agent skills
• Skills applied to tickets within the last 14 days

Playlist will then continue to sync skills applied to tickets incrementally every minute.

Once sync has completed, our service has the necessary information to match agents with tickets based on skills. The next step is to create a skills-based queue.

Skills-based queue

To create a skills-based queue:

• Create a new queue as per usual but select Skills-Based as your Routing model.
• Make sure your view is as isolated from other views used by Round Robin as much possible (there is no overlapping of tickets with other views).

Routing and load balancing

Every minute, our scheduled job will check for the oldest 1,000 tickets in your skills-based queue and automatically route them to the appropriate agent with the required skills.

The Skills-Based routing model uses a load balancing algorithm similar to Least Active. If there are multiple agents with the required skills to solve the same ticket, the agent with the least amount of open tickets will receive the ticket.

Once agents have reached their inbox limit, they'll stop receiving tickets as usual.

Updating agent skills

Whenever you make changes to your agents' skills, you'll want to manually click on the "Resync skills" button. This will ensure that Playlist has the most up-to-date information about your agents' skills.

Alternatively, you can wait for our scheduled job, which currently runs every 6 hours (interval is subject to change).

Disabling Skills

Playlist will stop syncing skills when you disable Skills. In order to disable Skills, you'll have to first delete all skills-based queues. Otherwise, you'll get an error message. 

Limitations

• For each job, Playlist will only search though the oldest 1,000 tickets (based on requested date or next SLA breach) from your skills-based queue.
• Ticket skills may not sync correctly if you remove a skill from a ticket that was created more than 24 hours ago.