ACD Skills

ACD skills are how NiCE CXone routes contacts The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center. to agents. Skills are assigned to agents to define the types of interactions each agent can handle. For example, you might have skills for different types of support questions, abilities such as speaking other languages, and so on. The system routes contacts to agents based on the agent's assigned skills.

Skills can be as broad or as specific as you want; you can create them based on any criteria. For example, you could create skills for certain languages, for different departments, agents' unique abilities, and so forth. Your combination of skills can be tailored to your organization's unique needs.

Skills are based on the channel Various voice and digital communication mediums that facilitate customer interactions in a contact center., or media type, the contact comes through—when creating a skill, you decide which channel it will handle:

• Chat
• Email (inbound or outbound)
• Phone (inbound or outbound)
• SMS
• Voicemail
• Work item

You can also create digital Any channel, contact, or skill associated with Digital Experience (DX). skills to handle any digital channel in your system. Digital skills are assigned to digital points of contact (digital channels).

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.

How Skills Help Contact Routing

When someone reaches out to your organization, the system routes them to an agent that can help them. The system is configured to make this routing process quick and as accurate as possible. ACD skills are an important part of the process. This is what happens: 

1. Someone reaches out to your organization by phone, email, chat, or SMS. The person is referred to as a contact and the way they reached out is the point of contact.
2. Points of contact The entry point that an inbound contact uses to initiate an interaction, such as a phone number or email address. (POC) are defined in your NiCE CXone system. Every POC is assigned an ACD skill and a Studio script. The script defines how to route contacts to agents. Every POC might have a different script, and each script is customized to meet your organization's needs.
3. The contact is associated with the skill assigned to the POC they used. The script might be set up to route the contact directly to an agent assigned to that skill. However, the POC's default skill is often only a starting point.
4. As the POC's script runs, it may prompt the contact to provide more information about what they need. For example, this can happen using an IVR Interactive Voice Response. Automated phone menu contacts use via voice or key inputs to obtain information, route an inbound voice call, or both. or by asking questions in a chat. Based on the contact's responses, the script assigns the contact a new skill.
5. The system then uses contact's skill to request an agent. It looks for available agents assigned to that skill. So, if a contact is assigned the Sales-US skill, the system would only look for agents who are assigned the Sales-US skill.

This is a high-level overview of the relationship between skills and routing. There are many system settings and routing configurations like bullseye routing and agents' proficiency scores that affect routing.

Skill Proficiency

Skill proficiency determines the priority of routing contacts to agents. Each agent assigned to a skill is given a proficiency level from 1 (highest) to 20 (lowest). When a contact enters a queue, the system looks for the first available agent with the highest proficiency for that skill. This ensures that customers are connected to the most qualified agents first, improving service quality and efficiency. Proficiency can also be adjusted dynamically through rules or performance metrics.

Bullseye routing uses proficiency levels to gradually expand the pool of agents for a skill when no one at the highest proficiency is available. It starts by targeting agents with the highest proficiency level, and if none are free within a set time, it “expands the bullseye” to include the next level, and so on. In other words, the ACD looks for agents with a proficiency of 1, and if it can't find an available agent, it expands the criteria to look for proficiencies of 1 and 2, and so on. This process continues until the contact is routed or the maximum level is reached. The goal is to prioritize the most skilled agents while minimizing wait times for customers.

Additionally, you can update the proficiency levels of agents in three ways:

• Edit the skill.

• Edit the user's ACD Users profile.

• Set workforce intelligence (WFI) rules. WFI can automatically change the proficiency level when agent metrics reach specified thresholds.

Other Uses for ACD Skills

ACD skills work together with other configurations in NiCE 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.

ACD Skills and WEM Skills

ACD skills and WEM skills serve different purposes, but they work together to make sure the right agents are scheduled and interactions are routed effectively.

• ACD Skills are used in real time to route contacts to the best available agent.

• WEM Skills are used in planning and scheduling to make sure the right mix of expertise is scheduled for forecasted demand.

To keep scheduling and routing aligned, make sure that every WEM skill is mapped to one or more ACD skill.

Key Facts About ACD Skills

• Instead of deleting a skill, you deactivate it. You can activate and deactivate skills as needed.
• You can have up to 10,000 active skills per tenant High-level organizational grouping used to manage technical support, billing, and global settings for your NiCE CXone system.. Inactive skills do not count toward this limit.

• If your system is configured for divisions Separate data securely between lines of business. Data can only be accessed from within the division it's part of., you can assign skills to divisions on the Skills page in ACD.  This option requires the Divisions > Division Assignment permission.

  • Currently, only new skills can be assigned to divisions.

  • You cannot change the division assignment.
  • Employees can only be assigned skills that are in the same division they're in.

• Each skill has an audit history tab. This tab displays a table of information about the creation and last modification of the skill.

• ACD skill names must be unique. If you modify a skill that was created prior to this restriction as introduced, the system checks its name. If the name is the same as another existing skill, you must change the skill's name before you can save it.