Omnichannel routing with unified agent status allows you to direct tickets fromemail (including web form, side conversations, and API), calls, and messagingto agents based on their availability and capacity. OnProfessional plans and above, tickets can also be routed based on priority and skills. Using omnichannel routing means agents can set asingle unified statusfor all channels, and important tickets are assigned to the agents who are most available to work on them. This provides the following benefits:
- Agents can respond to tickets faster
- You can prioritize work from high-value customers, including calls
- Agents are automatically assigned tickets and don’t have to go looking for them
- Agents can’t "cherry pick" the tickets they want to work on
- Agents can work on multiple ticket channels at once
- You can route calls to specific groups of agents based on the caller's country code of callers or other attributes
You can usecapacity rulesto limit the amount of work that’s assigned to agents at one time. However, regardless of these rules, agents can assign themselves work in excess of these limits if they want to (seeCreating capacity rules to balance agent workloads).
With omnichannel routing, instead of setting status individually by channel, agents can set a single unified status for Support, Talk, and Messaging. On Professional plans and above, admins can also define their own custom statuses such as “Out to lunch” or “In a meeting.” This can assist you when deciding how you want to route work items (calls, tickets, and messages) based on the agent status and capacity. SeeAdding unified agent statuses.
To use omnichannel routing, you have toturn it onandconfigure it. If you decide to stop using it, you canturn it off.
This article contains the following sections:
Requirements and limitations of omnichannel routing
There are a few requirements for using omnichannel routing, as well as some limitations you should consider before enabling the feature.
Requirements
- TheAgent Workspacemust be activated for your account.
- If your account has a Chat subscription, native messaging or Sunshine Conversations must also be activated.
- You can't be using live chat.
Limitations
Omnichannel routing with unified agent status currently has the following limitations:
- Omnichannel routing can't be enabled if you’re using live chat. Only Messaging is supported.
- Broadcast and hybrid modes for messaging aren't supported.
- Focus modeisn't supported.
- The ability to set an agent's status if they don't accept a number of message assignments, known as automatic idle, isn't supported yet.
- When using agent statuses, operating hours won't automatically set an agent's status.
- Light agentscan't be assigned tickets and can't set a status.
- The ability to change a Talk agent’s status from the Talk dashboard, mobile apps, or by using the Talk APIs isn't supported. Integrations that use Talk APIs to change agent statuses might also be impacted.
- The ability to set up multiple call routing fallback groups in Talk settings for a single line or IVR keypress isn’t supported with omnichannel routing. However, if you useskills with omnichannel routing, you can achieve something similar by configuring the skills timeout settings. When using skills, calls are routed to an agent with matching skills first and, only if the skills timeout is reached, "overflows" to other agents in the same group without the skills.
- Tickets are created for all calls as soon as they enter the queue. The setting “Create tickets for abandoned calls” is no longer available.Tip:You cancreate a workflow to automatically close ticketscreated for abandoned calls.
- If call forwarding is enabled and the status of an agent is automatically set to offline because the agent has been disconnected, calls to the agent will no longer be forwarded to the agent’s phone.
- Explore dashboardswill show per channel agent statuses but not unified custom statuses.
- At the time omnichannel routing is activated, agent statuses can get into an inconsistent state. It is important to manually set every agent's unified status toofflineinitially, then allow them to set their own status after that. For more information, seeAgent statuses are changing to online when enabling omnichannel routing.
- When using priority phone numbers in Talk, call tickets are assignedHighpriority but aren't necessarily put directly at the top of the queue.
- Talk Partner Edition isn't supported. The way you route calls for Talk Partner Edition depends on the integration you're using.
How omnichannel routing works
When you use omnichannel routing, tickets are generated for all channels of work when they enter the queue, enabling you to run triggers on them, including incoming calls. For brevity, channels of work are labeled asEmail(including tickets generated from email, web form, side conversations, and API),Messaging, andTalk. Email tickets enter the omnichannel routing queue only after the routing tag is added to them; messaging conversations and calls enter the queue as soon as they are received.
Omnichannel routing routes work to agents based on the following:
- Availability. This is defined by thesingle unified statusthe agent sets across channels.
- Capacity for each work channel. You define the maximum capacity for each channel and decide which tickets are eligible for routing.
- Skills. This is defined by theskills assigned to agents and ticketsand applies to all channels.
Then triggers are used to assign the tickets to groups, assign a ticket priority, and add a routing tag to the ticket. The following table shows the order in which tickets are routed to agents:
| Plan | Order in which tickets are routed |
|---|---|
Suite Team and Growth |
Tickets are assigned to agents in the order they are added to the queue. |
Suite Professional and Enterprise |
The ticket with the highest priority and oldest timestamp for entering the queue is routed to an agent within the assigned group with matching skills (if using), an eligible status, and the most spare capacity. |
More specifically, tickets are assigned to agents based on the following:
- Agent's status for the channel:
- Email tickets: An agent must have a status ofonlineorawayto receive email tickets.
- Messaging conversations: An agent must have a status ofonlineto receive messaging tickets. SeeSetting your agent status with omnichannel routing.
- Calls: An agent must have a status ofonlineto receive incoming call tickets.
If an agent forgets to set their status to offline, the status of the agent is automatically set to offline or away, as defined by an admin, when one of the following events is detected:
- An agent closes the Agent Workspace without signing out (by closing down their computer or browser window or putting their computer to sleep)
- An agent’s connection is lost due to a network outage
- An agent is idle for longer than theidle status thresholddefined by admins
SeeSetting your unified agent status with omnichannel routing.
- Agent's spare capacity for that channel:
- An agent must have fewer open tickets or messaging conversations than the defined maximum capacity for that channel to have spare capacity. SeeCreating capacity rules to balance agent workload.
- If more than one agent has an eligible status and spare capacity, the agent with the highest spare capacity for the relevant channel is assigned.
- If more than one agent has an eligible status and the same spare capacity for the relevant channel, the ticket is assigned to the agent who hasn't been assigned a ticket in the longest time.
- To be assigned an inactive messaging ticket (more than 10 minutes without a reply), an agent must have spare capacity. Whether inactive messaging tickets count towards an agent's capacity depends on your routing configuration.
- Agent's skills:
- An agent must have the same skills as the ticket in addition to having an eligible status and spare capacity.
- If you selectSkills timeout, tickets will be assigned without regard to skills if an agent with the matching skills is unavailable for a specified duration after a ticket reaches the top of the queue. If this option isn't selected, tickets will sit in the queue until an agent with the matching skills becomes available or a call reaches the maximum time in queue and is sent to voicemail.
Here's an example of a scenario for omnichannel routing:
- An important VIP end user has an urgent issue that needs to be resolved.
- They submit a ticket using the email channel.
- The account admin has set up a trigger for the account to add the auto-routing tag to these tickets and then assign a group, priority, and skills.
- As a result of this trigger, the end user's ticket automatically routes to a specific group with an urgent priority and the skillGerman.
- Omnichannel routing now assesses the ticket based on agent skills, status, and capacity.
- The routing system first understands that three agents are available for work.
- Second, it identifies that two of the agents have the skill (German language) required for the ticket.
- Finally, it finds which of those two agents has the most spare capacity for emails and assigns the ticket to this agent.
Reassigning messages and calls in omnichannel routing
Messaging conversations and calls require time-sensitive responses. Therefore, omnichannel routing has special reassignment logic for each.
Reassigning messaging conversations
With reassignment timing, a message can be reassigned to another agent in the group if the original agent does not take the message within a specific time threshold. The default threshold is 30 seconds. On Enterprise and above, that threshold can be customized.
The reassignment timing setting must beturned on during setupto reassign messages automatically if they aren’t accepted within the specified time. If that setting isn’t enabled, the routing engine will keep trying the same agent.
Reassigning incoming calls
When a call is offered to an agent, they can choose to accept or decline it. If the agent declines the call or doesn't answer within 30 seconds, the call is returned to the queue and assigned to another available agent. The call will continue to be offered to available agents in a round-robin fashion until themaximum queue waiting timeexpires.
- Hours since created>(calendar) Less than>1
- Status>Less than>Solved
- Channel>is>Phone call (incoming)
Summary of features
Omnichannel routing has a broad scope, so here's a quick reference of features and functionality.
Channels supported by omnichannel routing
At a high level, omnichannel routing can be used to route tickets from email, messaging, and calls. However, in business rules, these categories of tickets are broken down intoviatypes. The following lists show the supported via types (referred to aschannels) as they appear in Admin Center business rule conditions.
- Web form
- Web service (API)
- Closed ticket
- Ticket sharing
- Facebook post
- Web widget
- Mobile SDK
- Side conversation
- Merge
- Any channel
- Native messaging
- LINE
- SMS
- Facebook Messenger
- Telegram
- Twitter Direct Message
- Google RCS
- Apple Business Chat
- Google Business Messages
- KakaoTalk
- Instagram Direct Messenger
- Sunshine Conversations API
- Phone call (incoming)
- Phone call (outgoing)
Summary of features by plan
v omnichannel路由的可用性特性aries by plan level. The following applies to your Zendesk Suite plan level, or to the plan level of all individual products:
| Team | Growth | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
Routing email, messaging and call tickets |
Routing email, messaging and call tickets |
Routing email, messaging, and call tickets |
Routing email, messaging, and call tickets |
Routing based on capacity and agent status |
Routing based on capacity and agent status |
Routing based on capacity, agent status, and skills |
Routing based on capacity, agent status, and skills |
Default unified agent statuses |
Default unified agent statuses |
Default unified agent statuses |
Default unified agent statuses |
Routing based on priority |
Routing based on priority |
||
Up to 5 custom statuses |
Up to 100 custom statuses |
||
Message reassignment |
Customizable reassignment time |
Related articles
See the following articles for more information to help you get up and running with omnichannel routing and agent statuses:
178 Comments
Prakruti Hindia: could you help Jason get access to this community page?
We are interested in that EAP as well and also having trouble accessing it. Thanks in advance!
Agents are showing online with a green dot when they have not set their status to online or in many cases haven't even logged into ZD.Prakruti Hindia
Edit: The agents are also getting email notifications. hmm... I may turn Omnichannel Routing off for now.
你能确认你登录社区吗when accessing the above community EAP page?
Barry NearyYes, Logged in, that's how I am able to add this comment.
Barry NearyPrakruti HindiaThanks for getting us in there. The EAP has addressed our issue. Omnichannel routing lets us get agent audio/visual alerts when messaging tickets are transferred from one group to another. Without those tickets getting auto-assigned to a group. This is great! Thanks!
Barry NearyI realized I forgot to tag you on the request above. Could you help get us added to the EAP for disabling Omnichannel assignment after 10 mins?
Jason, glad to hear that!
Kris - I will drop you an email with the details.
ThanksPrakruti Hindia! I couldn't find the email and just want to make sure I didn't miss it. This is the main issue we're facing with our Messaging launch and would love to get access to this setting to have more control over the timeout behavior. Thanks again!
Can you use omnichannel routing with side conversations?
We have a backoffice team that only receives tickets via side conversations. They are not light agents, and they would like to use the capacity rules and omnichannel routing.
I tried setting it up but the tickets are not assigned to them automatically. They already have the capacity rules
Sacbe Alfonsina Ibarra E
We literally have just added side conversation tickets to the list of tickets that can be routed - they count towards email capacity, which includes webform, email, API and now side conversation tickets.
As usual , they need to have the auto routing tag and be assigned to a group to be automatically routed
Barry
HiBarry Neary
I have a question about reassignment and idle time.
If an email ticket gets assigned to an agent set to away and the idle time kicks in and sets them to offline, does that ticket automatically get pushed back to the main group to be reassigned to another agent?
Hi Adam
Currently that ticket will stay with the agent, as they have already been assigned the ticket. We have an upcoming feature that would enable you to reassign back to the group if the ticket reopens while the agent was offline
HI Barry,
will this feature upcoming consider OOO? Like Agent is 1-2 days offline (stay on agent, and let Agents work from a backup view) but is longer Offline or Vacation = Reassign to Group?
Thanks.
Tobias
HiTobias Hermanns
You would be able to setup a custom status called 'On Vacation' which, if chosen by the agent, then any tickets reopened when 'On Vacation' will be reassigned vs. if you are just Offline it wont
Hi, I'm wondering how Omnichannel routing might work with non Zendesk talk implementations? I saw the Limitations listed in the article about Talk API's, does that rule out telephony services such as Amazon Connect integrating via the Talk Partner Editions?
I wondered about any others in this community who use no Zendesk voice providers with Zendesk, and if you have activated Omnichannel routing? what was your experience and advice?
HiBarry Neary- you mentioned in the fall that Slack DM would be added to the omnichannel routing engine in Q1. Has this happened yet? We're not seeing our Slack DMs get routed like regular messages.
Thanks!
HiLauren Benkov
This is on our roadmap for this quarter - apologies for the delay
Barry
All good, thanksBarry Neary!
If I understand correctly, re-assignment of messages it not available for Growth plans?
E.g. if an Agent has 2 messages and disconnects, the message will not be re-assigned? Or can they still be re-assigned manually / through custom triggers?
是的,你是正确的。重新分配的功能tickets (skill-based routing) is not available on Zendesk Growth plans. It is available for the Professional and Enterprise Suite plans only.
However, you can set up customtriggersto automate the assignment of tickets to certain agents or groups based on predefined conditions on the Growth plan.
Thanks,
Barry NearyCan you please confirm if Ticket Sharing is supported by Omnichannel Routing? I have ensure the trigger that processes Ticket Sharing tickets to include the routing tag as per emails, but not sure if it is working.
HiRob Tihanyi
This will be developed and depoyed within the next few weeks
Barry
HiRob Tihanyi
We are now deploying this - it may take a day or two to be deployed to all instances
Let me know if you have any issues
Barry
HeyBarry Nearyjust checking on Slack DM again as the quarter has come to a close. Thanks!
No, I just need to get everything done
HiLauren Benkov
We are running a bit behind on the Slack DM request - should have it done in Oct. Will update you once its launched
Appreciate it!
Pleasesign into leave a comment.