Hi Barry Neary,

Thank you for responding to my feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to discuss it with me.

Group them together and add them to a specific capacity rule? Or is there too much variation in what agents feel is their maximum capacity (requiring lots of individual capacity rules)?
I understand your point. However, I am worried that adding more groups to manage capacity may not be scalable in the long run. The current process of assigning agents to groups and being more specific with them seems to involve too much extra work. It would be better if managers could individually assess each agent's capacity and decide whether it should be increased or decreased. I will definitely consider discussing the possibility of adding more groups with our managers.
We could introduce a delay, but the fear is that will negatively effect metrics like time to first response.
I understand your concern regarding this matter. However, there are pros and cons to both approaches. If we assign too many urgent tickets to an agent simultaneously, they may struggle to provide the same quality of support for each one. On the other hand, if we incorporate a buffer time, it allows the agent to decompress and focus on one ticket at a time. Our Workato workflow was designed to automatically assign tickets to agents with this buffer time in mind. We have received positive feedback that this approach reduces stress and results in more thoughtful and deliberate responses. Additionally, we have observed situations where one agent receives several tickets at the start of their shift, while another agent receives none. Implementing a pause timer would help distribute the workload more evenly among the team and ensure a smoother flow of tickets.
Do you think that reassigning after the agent has been in an away or offline status for X mins (configurable) would address this fear?
I understand your concerns, but we have confidence in our agents to handle the tickets effectively. Additionally, our managers keep a close eye on the tickets and investigate any patterns or indications of an agent trying to pass on their responsibilities. We initially set our timer in Workato to 10 minutes but have now extended it to run every 30 minutes.

If I were to specify the conditions for the Zendesk built version, they would be something like:
IF
- Time since assigned = 30mins
- Last agent update = 30mins
- Agent Status = AWAY or OFFLINE

ACTION
- Move the ticket back to the group for re-assignment.
There is one more thing that I may not have mentioned earlier. We have created four automations to transfer a new ticket to the next level of our support hierarchy if the first level is already at maximum capacity. Although this process is functioning, it's not efficient because we're limited to the Zendesk automation running hourly. In case all four of our groups are full, it would take roughly four hours for the ticket to be transferred to each group. Here are the conditions we have set for this workflow:

- Ticket SLA has breached
- Assignee is null
- Time since update is 1 hour

Action
- move ticket to next group

Then so on up the chain of groups.

Sometimes, when a ticket moves from one group to another, there can be delays if an agent becomes available in the previous group. This is because the ticket has to go through the other groups before it can loop back to the first one. Therefore, I suggest that Omnichannel routing should search for available agents in other groups when one group reaches capacity.