Question
Is there an option to equally assign incoming tickets to agents automatically?
Answer
Turn on and configure omnichannel routing to automatically distribute tickets among your agents. Omnichannel routing assigns tickets based on agent availability, capacity, and time elapsed since being assigned a ticket.
Note: Omnichannel routing is enabled as the default routing experience for Zendesk Suite accounts created after December 5, 2024.
For more information, see the article: About omnichannel routing.
19 comments
Shweta Gupta
Hi Leah,
Any updates on having a built-in capability within Zendesk for auto assignment?
1
Dave Dyson
Hi Shweta, as Nicole says in this thread, this is someone planned for later this year: Round Robin assignment
0
Scott
@... FYI Playlist now has a group distribution workflow to "round robin" tickets to different groups. Pretty simple to set up. Here's a diagram of how it works.
0
Aline F.
Hi! I have a question about the distribution of chats to agents.
What is the criteria for a chat to be assigned to an agent? I have an agent who is constantly being assigned chats even though there are other online agentes without any chats. Today she was assigned 3 sequencial chats, when there were 5 other online agets with no chats.
2
CJ Johnson
I have the same question as Aline F. I could have sworn there was documentation on how the assignment for chat worked, including timeouts, but there doesn't appear to be any documentation referencing this at all anymore.
Edit: Aimee found it, it's here.
0
Aimee Spanier
Hi, Aline and CJ. Chat assignment depends on how you have configured the routing behavior. You can find information about it here: Understanding Assigned notification routing behavior.
-aimee
1
Chet Reid
ZenDesk should consider buying the software from Round Robin that facilitates this process and then implement it as a feature.
We would love to use this, but the Round Robin company doesn't pass our security protocols, so we can't use them.
4
Barry Neary
Hi
We now have omnichannel routing solution which assigns tickets to agents within a group first based on load balancing (i.e. which agents have the highest spare capacity - assign them tickets first) and then by round robin (once agents all have the same spare capacity, assign tickets to whichever agents havent been assigned tickets in the longest time).
See here for more info
0
Shane Wetherington
Hi Barry Neary,
Is there a way to disable load balancing and only use the round robin feature?
1
Barry Neary
Hi Shane Wetherington
Not currently, we have plans to allow you to do so - but thats likely to be 6 months+
Barry
0
Nestor Rich
How can we see the history or analytics of assigned tickets, and make sure its divided equally. Especially If our tickets are being assigned manually
0
Darenne
Also, you can check the Assignee activity tab headline metrics in dashboard, you can access this if you have at least a Suite team/Support team! If this is no what you're referring to, please let us know more of your use case so we can provide an accurate response.
0
Jen Cox
Barry, it's been a minute. When will we be able to round robin assign without load balancing? There are two apps in the marketplace for this single feature. They are expensive and neither has passed my company's security review.
0
Barry Neary
Hi, round robin option is scheduled for release in Sept (no guarantees!)
2
Ronen Tamari
Barry Neary
Based on this article, under “routing models” it is implies that Omni-Channel routing doesn't really do load-balancing, and this is indeed the behavior I see.
In my case, when my first agent comes online in the morning, they immediately get as many tickets as possible until his “capacity rule” threshold is met.
So even if load-balancing is a thing to some extent, and since we start each day with enough tickets that are unassigned, effectively, the first agent that turns their unified status to “online” is getting a disproportionate amount of tickets.
What is your suggested solution here?
(assuming I would really want to refrain from simply lowering the capacity rule for all agents)
1
Barry Neary
HI Ronen Tamari
Load balancing occurs when several agents are available and the routing engine will select the agent with the highest spare capacity first. In your situation only one agent is available and they will receive all tickets (up to their max).
Do you want tickets to remain in the queue even if there is an agent available to take them? And if so, for how long? If, for example, still only one agent is available after say 5 mins, so the tickets not being assigned to him?
Barry
0
Ronen Tamari
Thanks for your response and explanation, Barry Neary!
I understand the limitation, and also the reason behind it, but in reality, since agent changing their status to “online” is a manual action, by default, at the beginning of each day, one agent will be the first one to go online and then receive all the tickets up to capacity.
This scenario could be easily prevented if there was a cooldown period that I could configure, or a ticket-assignment rate - for example, a condition that an agent can only get 1 new ticket every 15 min,
This way, if all my agents are going online between 9:00 am and 9:30 am, the distribution will still be evened out, and not fill them up by the order of when they manually changed status to “online”
I'm guessing that this could easily be a concern to any ZD consumer that has relatively smaller teams.
Let me know if you have more questions or any suggested solutions.
4
Robin Patton
I also have everyone online by 8:30 every day, but some get started earlier depending on their schedule. We do not run 24/7 support so we always have a small pile up of evening/overnight tickets first thing in the morning.
In agreement with Ronen on the need for a solution. Currently what we do is a manual even split at 7:30 to avoid someone that starts working early getting the bulk of morning tickets.
If we could set a time for all in office staff to be “online” at one time it would let the tickets distribute the morning load. Similar to how the Round Robin app lets you set a schedule for each agent.
Alternatively, a load balancer that would not give anymore tickets to the early arrivers until those that log on later have received X number of tickets would help as well.
We stay busy enough it would even out with a load balancing feature, but without this the early workers would just always have more ticket every day than those that come a little later- punishing those that select to begin their day earlier than their peers.
1
Barry Neary
Hi Robin Patton and Ronen Tamari
Thanks for the feedback. I will take note and hopefully we can add that to our long term roadmap
2