Skills are used to ensure incoming questions are routed to the correct agents. Skills are assigned to interactions based on their topic or interaction properties, and agents are limited to questions where their skills match ALL of the required skills. Skills are not required for implementations of iService that do not need skills-based routing. If skills are not used, CSRs will be allowed to receive any inbound message for all segments to which they are granted access. Keep in mind that adding a skill to a topic will prevent CSRs from receiving messages from that topic, unless the agent also has the corresponding skill.
There are two types of skills: standard skills and interaction property skills.
A standard skill is simply a label, such as Basic Tech, that is assigned to a topic. To handle the questions within that topic will require the agent to also be assigned the standard skill.
Interaction property skills are based on a specific value for an interaction property. For instance, an interaction property named Operating System might have three possible values – Windows, Mac, and Linux. If a skill is created that references a value for this property (e.g., Mac), then any message within any topic that has that interaction property value (e.g., Mac) will only be routed to the agents that have this skill assigned. Skills that are based on interaction properties are NOT assigned to topics. They are only assigned to agents. The values for the interaction property itself are assigned to the question using filters or are set by the contact when the question is submitted.
Creating and editing skills
 Example of a skill based on an interaction property value
To create a new skill in the iService application, click the New Skill button and enter the following information.
Name – The skill name is used throughout iService as a reference to the skill. It is displayed within the Topics, Departments, and Agents settings pages. Choose a name for the skill that is representative of the attributes agents need to answer questions. For example, "Technical Support 1" might be a good name for a skill used to describe entry-level technical support.
Interaction Property Based Skills - You set a specific interaction property value as a skill. This creates a skill that is applied to ALL incoming interactions that contain the matching property value. Skills that are based on a specific interaction property are not assigned to topics, because they apply to all messages regardless of their topic.
 An example of an Interaction Property skill is segregating Spanish questions. A filter can be used to identify Spanish words to determine that an incoming question is written in Spanish. That filter can set a value for an interaction property named "Language" with a value of "Spanish." You might name this skill "Spanish Support", and only assign it to agents that can correspond in Spanish. Any message that arrives into any topic with this designation would then only be routed to agents that speak Spanish.
The skills page lists all of the topics, agents, and departments that are using the skill. You can remove these by clicking the red ask next to the item.
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Deleting skills
Care should be taken when deleting skills. Any agents, departments, or topics that are using the skill will have the skill removed when deleted. Deleting skills is a two step process: Evaluate the impact of deleting and then confirm deletion.
Clicking Delete Skill will generate the following panel.
 The Delete Skills panel This panel shows all agents, departments, and topics that are currently using the skill. Clicking on Delete Skill will delete the skill and remove the association with each agent, department, and topic.
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Overriding skill requirements
Skills are used to determine the types of messages routed to agents via the Get Next process. However, they can be overridden by a manager from the when reassigning the question to any agent. CSRs can only assign questions to agents that have all of the required skills.
To learn about applying skills to Topics, see the Segment Settings - Topics section.
To learn about applying skills to Agents, see the Tenant Settings - Agents section.
To learn about applying skills to departments, see the Tenant Settings - Department section.
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