In Sinch Contact, categories can be used to logically group incoming conversations. A category allows you to apply a set of defined characteristics to all incoming conversations in a specific category. These characteristics are used in routing and allocating the conversation to an agent. For example, the category can have a set of skill requirements that are applied to all conversations that are assigned to this category.
A typical scenario is that you have different teams serving different countries, and they are reached by different local numbers. For example, you have a team in the UK who should serve all incoming conversations from a UK number and a team in France who should serve all incoming conversations from a French number. In this case, you would want to use two different categories, one for your UK team and one for your French team. For this setup, you would do the following:
- Create two categories, one for UK and one for France.
- Assign your incoming channels to the corresponding categories.
- Create two new skills, for example, TeamUK and TeamFrance.
- Set skill requirements for each category with the respective skill, that is TeamUK for UK, TeamFrance for France.
- Assign the skill appropriate for each country to the agents in that country, that is TeamUK for agents in the UK team, TeamFrance for agents in the French team.
This setup would not limit you from using any additional skills you might want to use to optimize operations for your team.
All incoming conversations must be assigned to a category. There is one General category available in Sinch Contact from the start where all incoming conversations are assigned.
Each category has a technical address that is used when assigning channels or conversations to a category. The address is used as the technical entry point and is only required when using the API for incoming conversations. API support for Sinch Contact is planned to be released early 2022.
See also:
How do I add, edit, and remove categories?
