# ACD Skill-based Routing

## Description

ACD Skills-based Routing allows you to assign

- agents to skill groups, for example Sales Group or Technical Support Group, in combination with

- a skill level (between 1 and 500) for each agent that represents the agent's skill level relative to other agents in their skill group.

Each MiVoice Business system can have multiple Agent Skill Groups or "agent skills", and 500 Skill Levels within each skill group. You can assign Skill Levels to any or all agents.

Agents who appear in more than one Skill Group may be assigned a different Skill Level for each group. Calls to a Skill Group are routed to the most skilled available agent based on their Skill Level. If the agents that are available have no skill level or are of equal skill priority level, the call is routed to the longest-idle agent.

An agent can be active in 60 groups at any one time.

NOTE: Skills based routing is enabled by default. You only need to assign the skill level of the agent. ACD Skill-based Routing is an enhancement to the ACD feature.

## Conditions and Feature Interactions

The following features must be programmed:

- Uniform Call Distribution

- ACD

## Programming

Before programming the ACD Skill-based Routing groups, program Uniform Call Distribution and ACD.

NOTE: Skills based routing is enabled by default. You only need to assign the skill level of the agent.

To program skill level for agents:

- ACD Agent Skill Groups form

- Set the "Group uses Skill Levels" field to "Yes".

- For each agent, set the Skill Level to a value between 1 (highest skill level) and 500 (lowest skill level). Blank implies 500 (lowest skill level).

NOTE: An agent can appear only once in a single Agent Skill Group. To disable Skill Levels for an agent skill group, clear the Skill Level field of all agents, save the form, set the "Group uses Skill Levels" field to "No", and save the form again.

## Operations

None

## Example

A large automotive parts distributor divides its agents into skill groups based on their knowledge of engines, transmissions, exhaust systems, brakes, and suspensions. Some agents are skilled in more than one product line—for example, engines and transmissions—and so take calls on those products. That is the simplest form of skills-based routing. Adding skill proficiency or expertise provides another layer to the routing algorithm. Proficiency is graded on a scale from 1 (most proficient) to 256 (least proficient). Consider the following agent who belongs to three skill groups but is more proficient is one that he is the others:

1. Engines: Skill level 1

2. Transmissions: Skill level 10

3. Brakes: Skill level 4.

He is skilled in all three product lines but is most proficient in engines, followed by brakes, and then transmissions. The calls he gets are prioritized as follows:

- Highest Path Priority (a number from 1 to 64 assigned in the ACD Paths form that determines call queuing order; the lower the number the higher the order)

- Highest Skill Level

- Longest waiting call

Finally, by introducing Overflow handling you can further refine call priority. Overflow allows calls to queue for most skilled agents first and then routes them to lesser skilled agents as call wait times increase beyond a programmable threshold. Overflow is part of ACD Path configuration.