Assignment Skills, Expertise Codes, and Weighting Factors

Skills are a special criteria type that you can use to minimize the number of assignment rules. One assignment rule can match different candidates to various objects based on the object characteristics and candidate skills.

Skills are the type of criteria that you use most frequently for implementing assignments in a customer service environment. For optimal assignment, you determine the criteria that you want to evaluate for each candidate to make sure that the candidate possesses the proper skills to handle the task.

The Siebel Business Applications provide predefined skills, and you enable and configure those skills at the criteria level using Siebel Tools. However, you can also create new skills using Siebel Tools. After you enable skills, Assignment Manager matches skills based on an assignment criteria comparison method in the same manner in which attributes are matched. Assignment Manager then applies scores and other filters to find the best candidate after a match has been made.

You can apply expertise codes that define an employee's expertise level for a particular skill with weighting factors to weigh skill scores to measure competency in a certain area for each candidate. Assignment Manager uses expertise codes to rank skills to find the most suitable candidate. For example, assume that you do not want to assign a novice to a service request that requires an expert. By using expertise codes, you can prevent assigning objects to underqualified candidates.