In Sinch Contact, allocating conversations to agents happens by skill matching. This is to ensure that the allocated agent has the right skills to handle the incoming conversation.
Conversations can have one or more skill requirements associated to them, defining the skill required to handle this specific conversation
Agents can have one or more skills assigned to them, depending on their knowledge and expertise. An agent’s skills can be active or inactive. Only active skills are used when automatically allocating conversations. Agents can themselves activate or deactivate skills in the Agent Workspace. This could, for example, be used by agents that step in and support different areas at times, or who are less proficient in certain skills and only activate those when the workload of better matched conversations is low.
Skill matching happens by comparing the skill requirements of a conversation to the active skills of available agents. The conversation can be allocated to an agent whose active skills include the skills required by the conversation.
If no skills are defined, conversations are allocated to any available agent.
To use a skill in Sinch Contact, it first needs to be added on a system level. Once a skill has been created in the system, the skill can be assigned to agents to indicate whether they have proficiency in that topic area. The skill can also be assigned to incoming conversations to ensure the conversations are routed to an agent with the correct expertise.
Skill requirements are assigned to a conversation either using categories or via API. Read more about categories. An API would typically be used if the conversation is handled by a bot or other workflow logic system before entering Sinch Contact. With the API, a skill requirement can be assigned to the conversation as it is handed over to Sinch Contact for handling. API support for Sinch Contact is planned to be released early 2022.
If no agent with required skill is available, the conversation will not be automatically allocated. However, all agents can still see and pick the conversation in the Queue view in Agent Workspace, regardless of whether their skills match or not.
