The more your business grows, the more customer requests you receive. As a result, you need bigger customer service teams. But we won’t discuss the number of your support reps, no. We will talk about their ability to cope with their duties at a high level and skill-based ticket management.
We’ll start with the number of customer requests. Let’s imagine it’s huge at the moment. You may understand that each customer requires help with his/her particular issue, which makes your brain blow off. It’s also true that it’s hard for one person to remember all the peculiarities of each question. Especially to be able to help their clients properly and manage thousands of tickets.
That’s why it would be perfect if there was a tool that could help to sort out unsolved tickets and assign them to people who are masters in their craft. It means they wouldn’t receive every single request to resolve immediately but see the issues they can deal with.
With such a tool, the agent’s productivity would rise substantially, and the number of enormous efforts would decrease.
And guess what? Such a thing exists! And it’s called skill-based routing, or, shortly, SBR. Now, let’s see what does it imply.
What is skill-based routing?
Skill-based routing is a strategy for assigning incoming customer requests to the most suitable support agent or group. In other words, the tickets will be assigned according to the needed skills for ticket processing, specialization, or status of your support reps or support group during the ticket routing process.
What are the benefits of Zendesk skill-based routing?
The skill-based ticket routing benefits are the following:
1. Better agent productivity.
With SBR, support agents can focus on the issues and questions they are most experienced in. This means that agents will be able to resolve more tickets. They will work with higher effectiveness, increase the level of customer satisfaction, and avoid manual ticket routing.
2. Higher rate of first call/request resolution and shorter ticket routing path.
If customers with unique problems connect to an expert in the field, they want to receive the best solution. Because the more expertise the agent has, the better advice he/she can provide. So the customer doesn’t have to ask specific questions or explain their problem repeatedly.
3. Shorter resolution time.
Since agents are more familiar with the problem, they can provide a helpful solution in less time than those who have minimum knowledge in that particular area.
4. More flexible workflow.
Skill-based Zendesk routing is that kind of feature that can replace a chain of complicated tools that serve approximately the same purpose. You simply use one single tool to route relevant tickets to the correct agents and it’s really as easy as it is. Moreover, the adjustment of Zendesk ticket routing settings can’t be simpler.
Skill-based simple ticket routing is that kind of feature that alone can replace a chain of complicated tools that serve approximately the same purpose.
5. Decreased expenses.
As soon as you remove the unnecessary manual actions from your agents’ workflow, they will have more time on their hands to work on issues they are most experienced in. You will also stop wasting your brain space to remember who does what best to be able to manually reroute tickets every time and organize your ticket routing workflows without any effort.
6. Higher customer satisfaction.
Obviously, the faster you provide a ticket-handling process, the happier the customers are. That’s why, with skill-based routing, you get an increased customer satisfaction rate with decreased overall efforts.
How does skill-based routing work in Zendesk?
First, you determine the main criteria for assigning incoming tickets to your support team. Second, select ticket attributes that set them apart from each other. Lastly, combine these two factors and develop an SBR strategy for your company.
When it comes to SBR in Zendesk, you are able to set certain skills to agents, according to things they can handle best, of course. It can be either product attributes, ticket channels, or even the language the customer speaks. So, the first thing you do is determine the main ticket criteria for assigning incoming tickets to your support team. The second would be the ticket attribute values that set them apart from each other. Lastly, combine these two factors and develop an SBR strategy for your company.
Now let’s move to things Zendesk specifically can offer you.
1. Activate Zendesk omnichannel routing
In 2025, Zendesk changed a bit, so the old approach to ticket routing became outdated. Now, you need to start by activating the routing option on the Zendesk Admin page. So go to Objects and Rules – > Omnichannel routing -> Routing configuration -> click on Set up omnichannel routing.
Next, put the checkmark near the Turn on omnichannel routing option. If you need to select the type of omnichannel routing (Queue-based or Group-based) and do the further setups that will help you to adapt routing to your needs. Click Save.
2. Define skills in Zendesk
First of all, you need to create skills based on specific criteria. Those skills (e.g., “Spanish Support,” “Technical Support,” “Billing Issues”) can be created by admins and assigned to agents based on their expertise. To create skills go to Admin -> Objects and rules -> Business rules -> Skills -> click on New skill type.
We’ve created skills based on language knowledge. Next, click on New skill and type the name of the specific language.
Then click on the skill type and select Edit to link the skill to a specific agent or group.
Then, select a condition related to your skill (Language – Is – English) and click on the Manage button to assign an agent.
Here is how we linked the Ukrainian language to the agent.
Finally, create as many skills and skill types as you need. We’ve created three languages for our Zendesk routing.
3. Choose the view for routed tickets
If you need the tickets sorted in one place, you can select a particular view where they will see the top tickets that match their particular skills. Just select the shared view or create a new one with the specific rule that will move routed tickets there. We’ve created My tickets view with the conditions you can see on the screenshot below. Take into account that you can add Skills conditions only if you have activated omnichannel routing, which is described in the first step.
Next, go back to the Skills page, select created view from the dropdown, and click Save.
4. Create triggers for automatic ticket assignment
Skills can be assigned to tickets using:
Triggers: Automatically tag tickets based on keywords, language detection, or other conditions.
Automations: Apply rules to tickets over time.
Manual Assignment: Agents can manually tag tickets with relevant skills.
The GrowthDot team uses triggers for automatic ticket tagging, so we discuss this approach in this section. First of all, we suggest to create a separate trigger for each skill. For instance, we created three triggers for Ukrainian, French, and English languages. Here is an example of conditions and actions for English. Go to Object and rules -> Triggers -> add Conditions (Ticket Status and Requester’s language).
Then, add Actions based on the satisfied conditions. Finally, click Save and check the result!
5. Check the routing process
Finally, check if Zendesk added a specific tag to every ticket with a New status. Also, you can see this ticket in the shared view for ticket routing. Congrats! You’ve ended a setup successfully!
Use skill-based routing for success
Skill-based routing means that customer support tickets are divided between agents according to ticket assignment methods. So, don’t hesitate to use SBR in Zendesk. Easily enable your agents to see specific requests so that they can solve them even more efficiently. As well as eliminate a ton of mundane manual work – just let the system route tickets to right agents each time. This change will certainly increase your support team’s productivity and develop your customer satisfaction rate, which is a straight way to your success.