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Automatically route chats to departments

Zendesk Team
  • Edited

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You can use departments in Zendesk Chat to filter chat requests to specific groups of agents. For example, you might want of your billing and payment questions to go to your Billing department, while troubleshooting questions should go to the Tech Support department.

When a chat is assigned to a certain department, the chat request appears only in the queues of agents in that department. Just as without departments, an agent must click Serve Request to respond to the chat.

One way to assign a chat to a department is to list departments on the Pre-Chat form so visitors can select the department they want to chat with. For more information, see Enabling the Pre-Chat form. If you'd rather automatically send chats to a certain department based on the visitor's current page, tags, locale, or other information, you can do so using triggers.

You should use the Still on site condition to add a one-second delay at the beginning of this routing trigger. All triggers fire at the same time and run through their conditions and actions sequentially, and the Still on site condition allows other triggers to perform actions that might be required before you can accurately route your chat. For example, if you need to reference a visitor tag to determine which department should receive a chat, this delay will allow the trigger that assigns the visitor tag to perform that action before it's used as a condition in your routing trigger. See below for an example of this condition.

To route chats automatically

  1. From the dashboard, go to Manage > Triggers.
  2. Click Create Trigger.
  3. Set up your trigger's conditions and actions.
    • Set the Still on site condition to add a one-second delay.
    • Choose the condition (in this case, a visitor tag) you're using to identify which department should receive the chat.
    • Select the Set Visitor Department action and select a department.
    For example, if you want to automatically send chats from the pricing page to the Sales department, you might set up your trigger up as shown below:

  4. Click Create Triggers.
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7 Comments

  • Andrew

    Does this work in conjunction with operating hours?  

    e.g. (using zendesk widget) we use API to set tag to "test", and then have a trigger for chats tagged with "test" to set department to "department1". If department1 is currently closed, would customer still have option to chat via Zendesk widget?

    1
  • Sergiu Birca
    Zendesk team member

    Hi Andrew,

    For department routing I would suggest you to use our Chat JS API instead of triggers (valid for both Web Widget and Chat Widget). It's easier to control what is offered in case if specific departments are offline.

    Documented here:

    https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000566208-Web-Widget-Chat-advanced-customization

    and here:

    https://chat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218624817-Recipe-Automatically-route-chats-based-on-department-online-status

    -2
  • Joris

    Hi, Is there a way to change the department after the chat started? (with a trigger) If the visitor is not served after 60 secs, I want the visitor to move to a different department. Thanks for your help,

    2
  • Jon Daniels
    Zendesk Customer Advocate

    Hey, Joris!
    It's not possible to change departments once the chat is started, but I did find this product feedback requesting this functionality:


    Set Department after chat started


    I encourage you to vote for this feature, so our product managers have an accurate view of the demand for this functionality!


     

    1
  • Amir Othman

    I have done this with additional actions before the Set Visitor Department, but the routing does not happen. The other actions (adding tags, Set triggered as true, etc.) worked, the tags were added and the chat session is set as triggered in the dashboard. Under what circumstance(s) would this not work? What would be a good way for us to debug/inspect this problem?

     

    -amir

    2
  • Aron

    I have multiple chat widgets using Brands. Is there an option to route all the chats from one particular widget to a certain department?

    I tried the triggers with Visitor URL but it didn't help at all.

    Thanks!

    Aron

    2
  • Simon Blouner

    Hey Aron

    I assume the Widgets are placed at different locations, and you should actually be able to do this via. some chat triggers. However, if you cant get this working, you can try to add the following snippets to your URLs where the widgets are present, in the header element, after the actual including of the Widget:

    <script type="text/javascript">
  window.zESettings = {
    webWidget: {
      chat: {
        departments: {
              select: 'The specific department name'
          enabled: ['The specific department name']
        }
      }
    }
  };
</script>

     

    0

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