In previous posts I have mentioned the need to properly configure and staff queues to meet the needs of your customers. Using ACD Skills with priorities plays an important role.
Skills are initially seen as a way to get an agent logged into their proper queues. Which is true if all the priorities are equal. Using priorities on skills allows for fine grain control to ensure the best trained agent available will get the appropriate caller.
Lets take language as an example, but this could also apply to different products or categories being handled. With language lets say you have a three groups of agents. The first is native english speakers who also speak french as a second language. The Second is native french speakers with english as a second language. With the third being those agents who only speak english.
The first and third group would both have the “English” skill with a high priority. However the first would also have the “French” skill at a lower priority than the second group, the native french speakers, which allows them to help with the french queues during high call volumes. A similar configuration reversed for the native french speakers who also speak english would be setup so they can in turn help with high call volumes on the english queues.
Doing this makes the queues more efficient as there are more people staffing to help during the high times but priorities on the skills ensures their primary queue is still staffed and calls handled in a timely manner by the highest skilled agent available.
This can also be extended to supervisors who only occasionally take calls, perhaps during high volume periods to keep up with the extra inflow of callers. The supervisors can be set to lower priority than the agents so they would only get calls when no agents are available for the queue.
There are many other cases where skills and priorities can be used to meet the needs of the business case at hand.