ACD Skills

An ACD skill routes each contact The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center. to the available agent who can best meet the contact's needs. Skills are based on the channel A way for contacts to interact with agents or bots. A channel can be voice, email, chat, social media, and so on., or media type, the contact comes through. Each skill delivers contacts to agents through only one of the following channels:

chat
email (inbound or outbound)
phone (inbound or outbound)
SMS
voicemail
work item

Skills can also provide an agentless Contacts made without a live agent for tasks such as one-way delivery of information or messages.. experience through Personal Connection (PC). PC includes automated Proactive Voice, Proactive SMS, and Proactive Email. PC skills are complex and interact with more features than other ACD skills do.

Key Facts About ACD Skills

You can create skills Used to automate delivery of interactions based on agent skills, abilities, and knowledge based on any criteria. Then, assign skills to agents based on each agent's abilities.
You can activate and deactivate skills as needed.
Skills can be as broad or as specific as you want.
You can have up to 10,000 active skills per business unit High-level organizational grouping used to manage technical support, billing, and global settings for your CXone environment. Inactive skills do not count toward this limit.
Each skill has an audit history tab. This tab displays a table of information about the creation and last modification of the skill.
Each agent assigned to a skill has a specified level of proficiency in the skill. The lower the number, the higher the proficiency level.
Contacts routed through the skill are delivered to the first available agent with the highest proficiency level.
You can update the proficiency levels of agents assigned to a skill. One way to do this is by modifying the skill itself. You can also set workforce intelligence (WFI) rules. WFI can automatically change the proficiency level when agent metrics reach specified thresholds.

Mr. Collins calls the Longbourn contact center. He reaches an IVR Automated phone menu that allows callers to interact through voice commands, key inputs, or both, to obtain information, route an inbound voice call, or both. and presses numbers to say he wants to ask a question about his account balance. He enters the queue through an inbound phone skill called EnglishBilling.

Four agents are assigned to this skill: Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, and Kitty. They have proficiency levels in this skill of 6, 5, 4, and 3, respectively. Jane (level 6) is already on a call, but Elizabeth (5), Mary (4), and Kitty (3) are all available. The skill routes the call to Kitty because she has the highest proficiency level of the available agents in the skill.

Skills work together with other elements of CXone, including:

Feature	How It Works with Skills
Campaign	Long lists of skills can become difficult to maintain. Campaigns A grouping of skills used to run reports. help organize skills and simplify reporting. You must assign each skill to a campaign.
Point of Contact	For inbound skills, you can assign a point of contact, or an entry point, for contacts to directly access the skill. For example, you can assign a phone number to an inbound voice skill or an email address to an inbound email skill.
Dispositions	You can configure post-contact work for your agents to complete after each interaction related to the skill. One option is to have agents apply dispositions Result assigned by the agent or system at the end of a voice (disposition) or digital (status) interaction. to the interaction. Dispositions mark the interaction as having a certain result and allow the agent to enter related information, such as an amount paid or a date and time to call the contact back.
Tags	Like dispositions, tags mark interactions a certain way. They are labels that you create and assign to a skill so that agents can mark an interaction with one or more as needed.
Do Not Call	Each outbound phone skill is associated with a do not call (DNC) group. Contacts who interact with agents through the skill can request to not be contacted by your organization again. When the contact is added to the DNC group, outbound skills in the same DNC group cannot reach that contact again.
Call Suppression	You can temporarily block outbound interactions to contacts based on criteria you choose. For example, you may want to block your outbound voice skills from dialing contacts in a certain region where a natural disaster has recently occurred.