With a talented team, the number of skills you might come up with is possibly endless. But before you set up Skills in Gladly, we recommend that you first figure out the skill structure for your team and who has those skills so you can create the proper individual and hierarchal skill setup.
Balance Skills with 'needs' and 'wants'
Instinctively, you might want to create a bunch of skills to cover all possible use cases. While you could, you should only create skills you plan on using now or very soon with People Match. If you don't plan to use a skill(s) to match an Agent with a Customer, then it's not worth creating the skill at all. Start with the skills you need for better routing and add/tweak nuance to skills over time.
Start your Skill hierarchy design
Start a spreadsheet and create two columns: Agent and Skills.
Agent – Name of Agents
Skills – Skills you'll assign to Agents
Explore the skills you need to improve process and routing. Try to look at Skills as a way to organize Customer questions and problems. Try and comprehend what those are and think of the types of skills that can be used so you can support them better from an Agents' perspective. This may mean going around your team to understand their skills better, as well as how those can be used to solve Customer issues better. For example, the following is a list of skills based on Customer scenarios and needs:
Language
Product Expertise
Soft skills
Technical adeptness
etc.
When you've come up with a list of skills by understanding your Customers' needs and scenarios, see if there's a need to organize and nest those skills. For example:
Language can be:
Language
English
Spanish
French
Product Expertise might be:
Product
Lights
Pots and Pans
Furniture
A skill can also be just an individual (non-nested) skill. For example:
Good at upselling
Great at retaining customers
Platinum Support Member
Put your proposed skill list to the test. Can the skills you collected improve how Customers are routed so they are more likely to be routed to the Agent that can best help them?
Repeat the exercise using different scenarios. Use this to revise and improve your set of Skills.
Next, figure out which of your Agents has this skill you have come up with. Have the rows be Agent names and have columns for the skills and match the skill with the Agent.
When you feel your skills list is complete, you're ready to add them to Gladly. See Create a Skill to learn how.
Flat vs nested skills
You're not required to nest multiple layers of skills. If you find that a flat structure works, then that's ok! We highly recommend experimenting with which structure works best as you determine how to apply boosts for skills.
Recommendation
A well-designed skill structure makes it easy to manage Skills as a whole, but it also effectively helps Customers get the Agent who can best help them. Let's use a sample skill hierarchy below for a home decor and furniture company.
Language
Language-English Language-Spanish-Proficient Language-Spanish-Advanced Language-Chinese-Proficient Language-Chinese-Advanced
Product Expertise
General Products Furniture-Kitchen-Living Room Lighting-General Lighting-Custom
Design Services
Custom Design-Home Custom Design-Commercial
Channel
Instagram SMS Chat
Support
General Support Order-Refunds-Cancellations-Returns Website Issues
Let's take a closer look at Product Expertise.
Product Expertise
General Products – Agents assigned this skill can answer product questions in a general sense.
Furniture-Kitchen-Living Room – Agents assigned this skill have elevated knowledge about Kitchen and Living Room furniture.
Lighting-General – Agents assigned this skill can answer general questions about lighting.
Lighting-Custom – Agents assigned this skill can answer questions about custom lighting.
When Customers contact in (let's say through chat with a question about custom lighting), Skills can be used with People Match to route them to an Agent with the skill Lighting-Custom. Still, it's important to remember that you must be able to recognize Customer needs (in this example, a specific product question) so they can be prioritized and increase the likelihood of getting matched with the Agent that has the matching skill. See Match Customer conditions with Agent skill to learn more.
See Prepare to Use Skills for additional insight on how to build skills.
Skills and People Match
Keep in mind that Skills don't replace People Match; they enhance and complement it, especially with the creation of multiple boosts, which could be made up of multiple layers of skills. Just because an Agent has a particular skill doesn't necessarily mean they'll always get matched with a Customer who requires that specific skill.