Skills and Responsibilities

By defining and assigning various skills and responsibility to Contact Center users, any service administrator can define call routing on a much more granular level. Once skills are assigned, users can be pooled by Nimbus, selecting only those users that are sufficiently responsible and skilled to handle a specific task.

Contact Center - Please note that custom skills and skill-based distribution are Contact Center features. 

Concepts on this page

To understand how Nimbus handles call distribution, we need to defined a few terms: 

Term	Definition
Skill Category	Allows to group and standardize individual skills by certain criteria, which also defines if the skill or related responsibility is graded and distinguishable by levels. Examples for categories could be: Language, Product Skills, Marketing Skills, Empathy, Adaptability.
Skill	Any (comparable) trait or characteristic to define a user by. Skills must be sorted in a (pre-configured) skill-category which also defines if its a skill with levels or responsibility. Examples for skills could be: German Language, Database Handling, Telephony Expertise.
Skill / Responsibility Level	Defined in a skill category. Allows to make skills and responsibilities comparable by assigning a numerical value Examples of levels could be: "Beginner = Level 1 | Expert = Level 3".

Creating Skill Categories

Skills categories group skills by a common denominator. Examples for categories could be:

• Categories with levels: e.g. "Beginner, Advanced, Professional" that allow to compare skills. Examples could be language proficiencies or product expertise levels.
• Categories with no level: e.g. general traits or task requirements such as "adaptive, compassionate, fast-learner". You could also expand this with hard requirements such as "European Region" to hard-filter your userbase based on legal or timezone-based requirements.

Why are skill categories necessary? A category makes skills (existing or new) easier to group by and handle in the Nimbus UI. Via the Organization Units assignment a category can also be standardized across your tenant or kept service-specific (e.g. to fulfill corporate or department requirements on proficiency descriptions).

Tips to get started

• Note that Skills and Categories follow the Organization Units (OU) rules. They can be either service-specific or put on the highest OU level to be available for company-wide use.
• Make sure to define the skill categories you need early before you start profiling your users via Responsibility Profiles. Try to keep your skills generic enough for a wide usage, but make them OU-specific if you need to adjust them frequently.
• Test your distribution needs early. Skills and Categories can be changed more easily before being put to widespread productive use. Once users and services make use of them, the process becomes increasingly complex to change as the skills are nested into various policies and users.
• Use clear, concise and consistent wording for your categories and levels to avoid misunderstandings. This also helps keeping your Responsibility Profiles and Distribution Policies transparent and readable, as they both refer to your configured skills.

Skill Levels

Skill levels can be enabled optionally per category to give means of call escalation to sufficiently skilled people when defining your Distribution Policies.

• Skills can have as many or few levels as needed. However, keep factors like clarity and UI clutter in mind.
• The descriptive title of a skill does not have any effect on call distribution. Only the levels are taken into account.

Safety against disruptive changes

Once you use skills - either assigned to a user or inside a Service Distribution Policies the order and levels cannot be changed easily. Changes would affect your existing / potentially productive policies.

→ You need to manually remove the skill from the user or distribution policy in order to change 

Responsibilities

A "native" level English speaker remaining remains equally capable regardless of time of day, but may not always have time to reply to calls. A responsibility level can added to any skill to set up call Distribution Policies to sub-groups of skilled people based on their responsibility.

• Responsibility is always combined with skills "has the required skills" AND "is currently responsible".
• Responsibilities can be used to distinguish skill importance, e.g. based on on time of day, calling customer background or for "high-demand" situations where users with certain skills are more responsible than others.

Responsibility Profiles can be created for your users to pick from, defining how high their responsibility is for the skills they possess.

Adding Skills

With one or more skill categories defined, individual skills can be added. Following the examples from earlier such individual skills could be: 

• German - Category: "Language Skills" with levels "A1, A2, B1, etc."
• Product Attendant Console - Category: "Product Expertise" with levels "Newcomer

Make sure to avoid "Adjectives" on skills that already have levels enabled in their category. Individual skill levels will later be defined per user and required in the distribution policy.

If a skill however is descriptive by itself (e.g. "Good Listener") but doesn't have further definition levels it can be helpful to provide this context to your service owners.

Safety against disruptive changes

Once you add skills to categories (e.g. "German" skill to the "Language" category) the category cannot be simply deleted anymore. → You need to delete

Assigning Skills to Users

Before you can assign skills you need to have final steps:

1. Have a "Contact Center" user license (via the "General" Tab) of that respective user. → This enables the "Skill" related features in extra Tabs for that user.
   

2. Now it's time to assign skills via the "Skills" tab. In this example we look at skills Greek and English of the category of "Language Proficiency". Levels are enabled for this category and thus need to be defined once the skill is added.
   

   

   Assigning skills and responsibility to a user

   Note that skills with levels are always including previous stages. An "Advanced" user will also be rated as "Beginner". You can exclude levels when configuring your Distribution Profiles (e.g. to start support with "Native Speakers" first and gradually lowering the skill requirements).
   This is a very good point to double-check if your skills / categories / levels are complete and in order. Once assigned to users they cannot be changed easily their levels are now being fixated.

3. Responsibilities were enabled for this skill category as well. This means the user has to define responsibility criteria in addition to existing skills level.
   
   Disabling responsibility will exclude the user from any Distribution Policies that demand a level of responsibility. Learn more about this on our Distribution Order page.
   Note that a user can have multiple Responsibility Profiles assigned, each with their own set / level of skills and responsibility.