Skills

Skills

The skill catalog is your organization-wide list of skill tags — English, Spanish, Sales, Tier-2, Billing, and so on. Skills connect two things:

1. Agents — tag each agent with what they can handle on the Agents page.
2. Queues — set Required skills on a queue (Queue edit → General tab) so callers preferentially reach agents who match.

Nova PBX → Call Center → Skills manages the catalog itself.

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Screenshot

Managing the Catalog

• Add — type a name and press Enter (or click Add skill). Skill names typed directly on an agent are merged into the catalog automatically, so it stays a complete inventory.
• Remove — click the × on a chip and confirm. Removing a skill from the catalog only removes it from future suggestions — agents and queues that already reference it keep it, and routing is unchanged. To actually stop routing on a skill, clear it from the queue’s Required Skills and from the agents.

Skill matching is case-insensitive (English matches english), but the catalog stores names exactly as typed — pick one casing convention to keep it tidy.

How Skills-Based Routing Works, End to End

1. Tag agents with skills on the Agents page.
2. Set Required skills on a queue — Queue edit → General tab. The input suggests names from this catalog.
3. Apply Changes. At apply time, each queue member’s ring penalty is computed from how many required skills their agent profile matches:

Scenario	Penalty
Agent matches all required skills	0 — highest priority, rings first
Agent matches some	Number of missing skills
Agent matches none	Total required skills — rings last
Member has a manual Penalty Override (queue Members tab)	The override — skill computation is skipped
Queue has no required skills	Member’s standard penalty, unchanged

4. Calls route by penalty. Asterisk tries lower-penalty members first in every ring strategy. The Weighted Random (Skills) strategy is designed around penalties and gives the most natural skills-based distribution — full matches ring first, partial matches next, non-matches only as a last resort.

Note

Penalties are recomputed when you click Apply Changes, not live. After editing agent skills or queue required skills, apply for routing to pick the changes up.

Common Patterns

Language routing. Catalog: English, Spanish, French. Tag agents with the languages they speak. One queue per language, each requiring its one language skill, fed by an IVR (“press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish…”).

Tiered support. Catalog: Tier-1, Tier-2. New hires get Tier-1; senior agents get both. The Tier-1 queue requires Tier-1 (everyone matches), the escalation queue requires Tier-2 — seniors ring first there, juniors only as overflow.

Specialty pools. Catalog: Billing, Tech-Support, Sales. One general queue with no required skills (everyone rings); specialty queues each require their specialty so matching agents are preferred without excluding anyone.

Troubleshooting

• Skills don’t seem to matter — confirm the queue actually has Required skills set, the agent has matching skills, and you clicked Apply Changes after the last edit.
• An agent with the right skill isn’t ringing first — check the queue’s Members tab for a per-member Penalty Override (it beats skill computation), and confirm the agent is Available and enabled on the Agents page.
• Deleted a skill and worried about routing — catalog removal never changes routing; it only trims the suggestion list.

Related Pages

Page	Purpose
Agents	Tag agents with skills, manage availability.
Queues & Queue editor	Required skills, ring strategies, member penalties.
Reporting	See how queues and agents perform.