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Prioritize Additional Routing Skills

If you use skills-based routing with either the attribute setup method or Apex code, you can set some skills to additional. For additional skills, you can now specify the order in which skills are dropped if after the specified timeout no agent with that skill is available. Higher priority-value skills are dropped first. Lower priority-value skills, for example 0, are dropped last.

Where: This change applies to Lightning Experience in Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

Why: Initially, Omni-Channel tries to route a work item to an agent with all the requested skills. If an agent with all the skills isn't available, Omni-Channel drops skills marked as additional based on their priority value. After the additional skills timeout period as specified in the routing configuration, Omni-Channel drops skills with the same priority value until an agent with the remaining skills is available. The work item is then routed to the best-matched agent, even if the agent doesn’t have all the additional skills.
Note

Note

Skills with the same priority value resulting from the attribute setup method or Apex code belong to the same group and are dropped together.

How: In the Attribute Setup for Skills-Based Routing setup flow, select Additional Skill and set the Skill Priority. Skill Priority value setting

For example, you can set up the following required and additional skills:
  • Language: English and French are required, not additional.
  • Issue Type: Software and Hardware are additional skills of the highest priority, 0.
  • Product: Speaker, Mouse, and Keyboard are additional skills of priority 1.
  • Location: USA, England, Canada, and France are additional skills of priority 2.

In this example, Language skills aren’t additional, so they are never dropped. Skills associated with the Issue Type field are the highest priority, so Omni-Channel drops them last. Skills associated with the Location field are dropped first.

The Drop Additional Skills Time-Out, set in the routing configuration, specifies the amount of time to wait before dropping each set of additional skills.

Note

Note

If you have existing attribute-mapping sets with additional skills, these skills are treated as if they were set to priority 0 and are dropped last. You can adjust them by editing the attribute-mapping set. Consider adjusting the Drop Additional Skills Time-Out to account for the time to drop additional skills in priority order. The time required to route the work item to an agent might be longer than when additional skills were dropped all at once.