One of the main benefits of moving to messaging is access to omnichannel routing. Omnichannel routing is a routing engine that automatically assigns tickets from any channel to the best available agent using a consistent approach.
Omnichannel routing is the default routing engine for all new Zendesk accounts. With a single routing configuration, you can control:
- Prioritization
- Assignment
- Skills-based routing
- Reassignment
- Agent acceptance
You can continue using your existing group structure, or move to custom queues for more advanced routing scenarios. For example, custom queues can help with routing to multiple groups, overflow handling, and percentage-based routing.
Some capabilities depend on your plan. For more information, see About omnichannel routing.
This article includes the following topics:
Before setting up omnichannel routing, it’s recommended that you understand some key concepts.
Key concepts
The following list includes high-level descriptions of key messaging and omnichannel routing terminology and concepts. Use the links in each list item to learn more.
- Capacity: The maximum number of Open tickets that can be assigned to an agent. Capacity rules, omnichannel routing’s equivalent of Chat limits, are used to define the maximum capacity of an agent for each channel. Capacity is released when an agent marks the ticket as Pending, On-hold, or Solved, or when a conversation becomes inactive. See Managing end user presence and automatic capacity release.
- Conversation: For the messaging channel, this equates to the entire lifecycle of a customer request. A conversation begins when the end user enters their first comment in the Web Widget, mobile SDK, or social messaging channel, and ends when the related ticket status is Closed.
- Session: For the messaging channel, the real-time live chat-style interaction between an end user and a human or AI agent. The session can be ended by the ticket being Closed, ended manually by an end user or the agent, or automatically using a business rule that includes the End session action. Once the session has ended, the end user is prevented from interacting any further with that conversation, and the agent can continue to work on the associated ticket.
- Skills: Skills are attributes that are applied to the ticket and given to agents that provide more granular control over which tickets are routed to which agents. Skills for omnichannel routing span all channels. Typical skills include languages, product expertise, and permission to handle VIP requests. Omnichannel routing can use skills to further refine your ticket routing. See About using skills to route tickets for more details.
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State: The activity status of a messaging session can be one of these
three states:
- Active if an end user has responded to the ticket within the allowed idle period. By default, this is set to 10 minutes.
- Inactive if the end user has not responded within the allowed idle period, or if the ticket status is set to Pending, On-hold, or Solved. An inactive session can become active if the end user responds.
- Ended is a terminal state. Ended sessions can’t be reactivated. Agents and end users can’t communicate in an ended session.
- Unified agent status: The way an agent controls their availability in omnichannel routing. This replaces individual channel statuses, which only allowed an agent to control their availability for one channel at a time.
Setting up omnichannel routing
This section provides a high-level guide to moving from Chat-based routing to omnichannel routing, and some key differences between Chat and omnichannel routing settings and elements.
This section includes the following steps:
- Step 1: Prepare to migrate to omnichannel routing
- Step 2: Record your Chat routing settings
- Step 3: Recreate your chat limits as omnichannel capacity rules
- Step 4: Recreate chat skills as agent skills
- Step 5: Configure additional omnichannel routing settings
- Step 6: Convert Automatic Idle time to omnichannel idle timeout
- Step 7: Turn on omnichannel routing
Note: If you’ve gone through the voluntary live-chat-to-messaging migration process, your routing is still determined by your Chat settings. Follow the steps below to migrate to omnichannel routing.
Step 1: Prepare to migrate to omnichannel routing
The tasks below can help ensure the migration to omnichannel routing goes smoothly.
-
Review your current routing strategy across your Zendesk environment, including Chat, email, social messaging, and Zendesk Voice. Consider:
- How your Support team is organized
- Whether you use skills to route tickets to agents
- How tickets are grouped
- How chat limits are determined
- How tickets are prioritized
- How ticket reassignment is handled
-
Plan your future routing
strategy by reviewing the omnichannel routing documentation
and planning for your current and future routing needs. Omnichannel routing
applies across your entire account and includes several improvements over
live chat, such as:
- Built-in prioritization by ticket priority or SLA
- An omnichannel approach to capacity
- An omnichannel routing queue or custom queues
- A unified agent status
- Auto-acceptance of tickets
- Real-time monitoring
- Integration with intelligent triage
- Prepare your agents for the upcoming changes. Let them know when and why you’re migrating. Give them access to the information they need, and make sure they know the basics of working with omnichannel routing.
Step 2: Record your Chat routing settings
Before you activate omnichannel routing, record your Chat routing settings where you can access them later. They won’t be visible after omnichannel routing is turned on, but you’ll want to reference them in subsequent steps.
Step 3: Recreate your chat limits as omnichannel capacity rules
| Chat dashboard setting | Admin Center setting |
|---|---|
| Settings > Routing > Settings tab > Chat limit | Objects and rules > Omnichannel routing > Capacity rules |
Capacity rules are the messaging equivalent of chat limits.
Both allow you to cap the number of incoming chat notifications assigned or broadcast to each agent. Capacity rules offer a more nuanced approach to ticket assignment – for example, Chat limits look at the number of currently-active tickets assigned to agents, while capacity rules let you choose whether to include inactive tickets towards an agent's limit, and automatically adjusts their capacity as ticket activity status changes. For more information about how capacity rules work, and instructions for configuring them, see Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads.
Step 4: Recreate chat skills as agent skills
| Chat dashboard setting | Admin Center setting |
|---|---|
| Settings > Routing > Skills tab | Objects and rules > Business rules > Skills |
If you use Chat skills, or want to use skills in your omnichannel routing configuration, you’ll need to create them as agent skills in Admin Center, assign these skills to agents, and create triggers to apply the skills to tickets.
Step 5: Configure additional omnichannel routing settings
| Chat dashboard setting | Admin Center setting |
|---|---|
| Settings > Routing | Objects and rules > Omnichannel routing > Routing configuration |
Follow the guidelines in managing your omnichannel routing configuration to configure how your routing engine will work.
The following table describes some of the differences in how live chat and omnichannel routing manage key routing settings and define important concepts.
| Setting | In Chat | In omnichannel routing |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket sorting | All tickets are ordered by time of arrival. | All tickets are ordered by time of arrival unless you are on Professional or Enterprise plans, where the default is by ticket priority and then time of arrival. For example, Urgent oldest ticket first. You can also choose to order tickets by Next SLA Breach. |
| Assignment method | Can be either Broadcast, which notifies all agents of an incoming request, or Assigned, which notifies only a specific agent of an incoming request. | Only supports Assigned mode, which is more efficient than Broadcast mode. It can also use highest spare capacity, highest spare capacity by percentage, and round robin to distribute tickets to agents. |
| Skills-based routing | Uses Chat skills to route tickets to the appropriate agents. | Uses skills shared across all channels to route tickets to appropriate agents. |
| Focus mode | Prevents an agent active on a Chat, or a Voice call, from being assigned tickets on the other real-time channel. | Prevents an agent active on messaging, or a Voice call, from being assigned tickets on the other real-time channel. |
| Reassignment | In assigned mode, you can control how long to wait for an agent to accept the incoming Chat before attempting to reassign it to another agent. | Messaging reassignment timing allows you to configure how long to wait for an agent to accept the incoming messaging ticket before attempting to reassign it to another agent. Other advanced options include reassignment of reopened tickets to another agent, auto-assignment of Open tickets to another agent when an agent changes their status, and reassignment through queues to reevaluate a reassigned ticket against custom queue conditions. |
Step 6: Convert Automatic Idle time to omnichannel idle timeout
| Chat dashboard setting | Admin Center setting |
|---|---|
| Settings > Personal > Idle timeout tab | Objects and rules > Omnichannel routing > Status timeout |
In Chat, agents can set an automatic idle time after which their status can be updated from Online to Away or Invisible. Omnichannel routing’s idle timeout setting allows admins to set the idle time and disconnection behavior for each agent status.
Step 7: Turn on omnichannel routing
You’re now ready to turn on and configure omnichannel routing.
To turn on omnichannel routing
- In Admin Center, go to Objects and rules > Routing configuration.
- Click Turn on omnichannel routing.
When you turn on omnichannel routing:
- Chat routing functionality is turned off and all Chat routing settings in the Chat dashboard are hidden.
- Changes to agent status and Explore reporting are applied. See Considerations for using omnichannel routing with Chat.