Methods for routing customers to an agent include receiving a customer communication; representing the customer communication as an array of one or more agent skills desired to handle the customer communication in one hot coding format or as a vector with an induced metric using an embedding algorithm; routing the represented customer communication to an agent having the one or more agent skills; measuring performance of the agent in relation to the one or more agent skills during or after the customer communication; updating, in real-time, one or more performance scores of the agent in a skill profile, wherein the one or more performance scores are related to the one or more agent skills; and routing subsequent customer communications based on the updated one or more performance scores.