This article is for admins who set up a customer service agent in Customer Service Management.

A skill is a reusable set of instructions that your AI agent follows in a specific situation. Think of it as a packaged playbook: instead of responding generically, the agent invokes the skill when a request matches a known case, then works through the steps you’ve defined — including using the right tools in the right order.

Use a skill when your agent needs to follow a particular process to handle a request, such as collecting specific information, making decisions, or calling tools in sequence. For example, you can create a skill that investigates a billing issue, or one that looks up a customer, creates a request on their behalf, and hands the conversation to a human agent when it can’t finish on its own. You reuse that skill across conversations without rebuilding the logic each time.

For a complete, step-by-step example, see Example: build a skill.

What goes into a skill

Every skill has four parts:

• Skill name — a clear name that describes the task, such as “Investigate an unexpected charge”. You can name it anything, but a specific task name keeps your skills easier to manage.

• Description — a short explanation of when the agent should use the skill. The agent reads the description to decide whether a skill applies to an incoming request, so make it specific to the situations it covers.

• Instructions — the steps the agent follows once it uses the skill. This is where the detail lives: what to do, in what order, and what to do with the results.

• Tools — the capabilities the skill calls to perform actions, such as looking up a customer or retrieving an invoice. Tools are optional.

Before you begin

• You need admin access to the customer experience where the agent is set up.

• Rovo must be enabled for your site, because AI agent support depends on it.

• If a skill needs to perform an action — such as looking up a customer or retrieving an invoice — add the matching tool first, so it’s available to select when you build the skill. See Set up actions for your AI agent and Configure MCP tools for AI agents.

• A published agent version can have up to 30 enabled skills.

Create a skill

To add a skill to your AI agent:

1. In your AI agent’s settings, select Skills from the sidebar.

2. Select Add skill.

3. In Skill name, enter a name that makes the skill’s purpose clear to recognize.

4. In Description, briefly describe the customer request or situation that should trigger the skill. Keep this focused on when to use the skill — put the workflow steps, tool calls, and response guidance in Instructions.

5. In Instructions, set out what the agent should do to complete the task, in the order you want it followed. Include what information to collect from the customer, which tools to use and when, how to use the results, and what to do if information is missing or a tool fails. To reference a tool you’ve added, type /tools and select it.

6. Under Tools, select Add tools and choose the capabilities the skill needs. Leave this blank if the skill only guides a conversation and doesn’t call any tools.

7. Select Save.

Your skill is saved to the current agent version. While that version is a draft, you can keep editing and testing the skill before you publish. When you publish the agent version, its skills are fixed to that version — later edits apply to the draft, not the published one.

Test your skill

Make sure the skill is enabled so your agent can use it, then test it in your agent’s draft version before publishing:

1. Open the test panel and send a realistic customer request that should trigger the skill.

2. Check that the agent asks for the information it needs, follows your instructions, and uses the expected tools.

3. Open the test conversation in Conversation review and select View steps to confirm the skill was invoked and review what the agent did. See Review your AI agent’s conversations.

Try a few variations, including requests with missing information and ones that shouldn’t trigger the skill. If the skill fires in the wrong situations, refine its Description. If it misses steps or handles the request incorrectly, update its Instructions. Save and test again.

Edit, disable, or remove a skill

1. In your AI agent’s settings, select Skills from the sidebar.

2. Select the skill’s name to open it.

3. Change the name, description, instructions, or tools, then select Save. To remove the skill, delete it and confirm when prompted.

You can disable a skill at any time to stop the agent using it without deleting its configuration — useful when you want to pause a skill but keep its setup.