One of the best ways to increase agent efficiency and streamline your support tasks is to use routing options to manage your ticket workflows. Zendesk provides a number of business rules and routing options to make sure your tickets get to the right agent as quickly as possible. You can either configure a "push" routing model, which assigns tickets to agents, or a "pull" model, where agents assign work to themselves. This article explains these options and how they can be combined to meet your unique needs.
This article contains the following topics:
- About the standard Zendesk ticket routing framework
- Understanding the routing models
- Understanding other business rules and configuration options that influence routing behavior
Before choosing which routing solutions or business rules to use, see Best practices: Planning your routing workflow.
About the standard Zendesk ticket routing framework
When you create an account, you can start receiving support requests right away using the default support email address created during the registration process. All support requests sent to your account, via email or another channel, automatically become tickets in your system. Zendesk provides standard views and triggers that work together to create a basic routing framework for tickets.
Without any configuration beyond the initial registration process, the standard triggers and views work together so that every new and updated ticket appears in at least one view and triggers at least one notification.
- Your unsolved tickets
- All unsolved tickets
- Recently updated tickets
- Notify requester and CCs of received request
- Notify all agents of received request
In this basic framework, agents can use the trigger notifications and views to assign tickets to themselves or tickets can be assigned to them manually.
Understanding the routing models
In the simplest workflows, fine-tuning the standard views and triggers might provide sufficient routing. However, even simple workflows can benefit from more advanced routing logic. There are two types of routing models you can configure: "push" models, which assign tickets to agents, or a "pull" models, where agents assign work to themselves.
Routing models
- Push routing models:
- Omnichannel routing: Route email (including web form, side conversations, and API), messaging conversations, and calls based on agent status and capacity. On Professional and Enterprise plans, you can also route tickets based on priority and skills. On all plans, you can run triggers against new tickets from all channels, and you can use triggers to set and manage skills on tickets. See About omnichannel routing with unified agent status and Using skills with omnichannel routing.
- Round robin: A way to assign tickets by rotating through your agents. Round robin ticket management ensures tickets are distributed evenly among agents, but doesn't consider ticket complexity or expertise requirements. You can use the Round Robin app to build a round robin workflow.
- Manual ticket assignment: Manually triage tickets and assign them to your agents. This works best for small teams with low-volume ticket queues. This routing model is best used in conjunction with other business rules and configuration options.
- Pull routing models
- Play mode: Play mode allows agents to click through a view using the play button and be assigned to the next available ticket automatically. Play mode can be restricted to only display tickets from a specific view and, on Enterprise plans, admins can configure Guided mode so agents are only allowed to access tickets using the Play button. See Using the Play button and Using a Play button-centered workflow.
- Standalone skills-based routing: Skills are agent attributes that determine an agent's suitability to work a ticket that requires them. Skills can be used as a standalone routing method, where agents use filtered views to assign tickets with matching skills to themselves, or as part of omnichannel routing (push method). See About using skills to route tickets.
- Manually self-assigning tickets from views: Allow agents to assign tickets directly to themselves from views. Letting agents choose their own work at their own pace can work well for some small teams, but can quickly become unmanageable.
Deciding whether to use omnichannel routing
Omnichannel routing is Zendesk's most sophisticated and complete routing solution. It provides consistent routing logic across the email (including web form, side conversations, and API), Messaging, and Talk channels. Tickets are assigned to agents based on their availability and capacity. On Professional plans and above, tickets can also be routed based on priority and skills. Using omnichannel routing also means agents can set a single unified status for all channels rather than setting statuses for each channel separately.
When using omnichannel routing, tickets are created as soon as a request enters the queue from any channel. This means triggers can be run on all channels, including Talk. Additionally, omnichannel routing enables you to use triggers to assign skills to tickets. This means skills can be automatically updated when tickets are created or updated, not just upon creation.
- Omnichannel routing has some requirements and limitations to be aware of before choosing this routing solution.
- What Zendesk account plan do you have? See the Summary of features by plan to ensure you'd have access to the functionality you want to use.
- The size of your organization. Omnichannel routing will provide increased efficiency at any scale, but especially for larger and more complex organizations.
- The channels through which you receive tickets. Even if you only use one of the channels supported by omnichannel routing, it can still be a great fit as your routing solution. However, it also means simpler routing solutions could also work well for you.
- The business rules you already have in place to help route tickets. Standard triggers and views provide a simple, but effective routing framework. You may have added new ones or modified the originals. Are those business rules accomplishing what you want? What, specifically, are you looking to address by considering alternative routing solutions?
After considering all of this, if you've decided to use omnichannel routing, see About omnichannel routing, Turning on omnichannel routing, and Managing your omnichannel routing configuration.
If, on the other hand, you want to use routing solutions such as standalone skills-based routing, play mode, or some custom solution, revisit the list of tools and configuration options you can use.
Understanding other business rules and configuration options that influence routing behavior
- Support addresses: By default, you have one email address for users to submit tickets to. Using multiple Support email addresses provides a way to route tickets based on the email address the customer used to contact support. See A complete guide to understanding email in Zendesk: How the email channel works and Adding support addresses for users to submit tickets.
- Ticket forms: A predefined set of ticket fields for support requests. Using multiple ticket forms provides a way to collect more specialized information from customers and then route tickets based on the ticket form that the customer used. See Creating multiple ticket forms, Presenting ticket forms to end users, and Adding custom fields to your tickets and support requests forms. (Suite Growth and above or Support Enterprise)
- Views: A way to organize tickets based on certain criteria. You can think of them as containers for your tickets. A single ticket can appear in multiple views or no views at all. When you begin using Support, every ticket appears in at least one standard view. You also define targeted views, which allows agents to self-assign tickets from a pre-filtered set of tickets in their view. See Creating views to manage ticket workflow and Best practices for creating views.
- Triggers: Business rules that perform actions whenever a ticket is created or updated. They can send notifications and modify ticket properties. See About triggers and how they work and About the standard Support triggers.
- Automations: Business rules that perform actions when time events occur after a ticket property was set or updated rather than immediately upon the ticket being created or updated. Similar to triggers, they can send notifications and modify ticket properties. See About automations and how they work and About the standard Support automations.
- Channels: The way you communicate with your customers and can be used as a condition in triggers to route tickets based on the channel through which it was received. See About Zendesk channels.
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs): An agreed upon measure of the response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customer. SLAs can be used as conditions in views and automations to reroute and prioritize tickets based on service promises made to customers. See Defining and using SLA policies and Leveraging SLAs to drive team performance. (Professional and Enterprise)
- Custom ticket fields: You can customize your ticket forms and web forms to require certain information from customers before a ticket is accepted into the queue or you can add custom ticket fields to the tickets themselves. Then you can use that information as conditions in business rules to route tickets.
16 Comments
hi, may I know how to create triggers that assign tickets to agents or groups that have matching skills? I am using a professional version Zendesk and looks like there is no condition can be setup on a trigger for matching skills...
Hi Feng Gao
Currently skills cannot be used as a condition or an action in a trigger. We are working on adding skill to the omnichannel routing engine that will automatically assign a ticket with a skill to an agent who also has that skill.
In the meanwhile, you would need to use skills filtered view - see here
Get it, thanks Barry!
Hi,
I am looking into what options might be available after a ticket has been answered by a team member if the customer then decides to write back (say, with a follow-up question).
Is there a way of automatically routing that ticket back to the team member who initially answered the query? (We may have this set at the moment based on who is at work/whose shift is on, but it might not be ideal to have one and the same customer receive answers from different team members just because they might receive a reply faster in this way.)
TIA
Hi Henrik Heckmann
In just over a month we are planning to release a feature in omnichannel routing that will automatically reassign a reopened ticket back to the group if the agent is offline
Barry
Hi Barry,
Thank you very much for the fast reply. One thing we are investigating is if it might be useful to aim for the opposite approach (possibly when overall volumes are low): say an agent is offline (on a break/end of the working day), and we know that they'll be back, is it possible to create a rule that sends the reopened ticket straight back to them (rather than the group in general)?
Hi Henrik Heckmann
The ticket once assigned stays with the agent. The agent would typically set the ticket to 'Solved' once completed, but that ticket can be reopened by an end user typing a reply. That would change the ticket status back to 'Open', but it would still be assigned to the same agent
Thank you, Barry, much appreciated!
Hi Barry,
We would like to use the Omnichannel routing feature. I want to confirm what is the requirement in order for me to turn on Omnichannel routing (when I attempted to turn this feature on, it was not available for me to enable):
1. We do not have chat, phone set up as a channel. We only have email and form (user enters issue via the Zendesk form) setup. Must we have more than one channel setup to use Omnichannel routing?
2. We have an Enterprise plan
3. We have the Support standard agent interface (legacy). Must we upgrade to the Zendesk Agent Workspace in order to use the Omnichannel routing? Refer to the article about the two Agent Interface: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408893481114-Agent-interface-overview-video-#h_01EXMZFT8RER7XV3AMHCTPJZGP
Hi Uyen
Yes, you would need to upgrade to Agent Workspace to use omnichannel routing
Barry
Barry Neary,
Once omnichannel is turned on, we wish to create triggers so it uses omnichannel routing:
1. New tickets for Customer A are assigned to the group Tier 1 - CustomerA. Trigger will be:
In the Conditions section: meet all of the following conditions - ticket status = new, organization = CustomerA
In the Actions section:
2. New tickets for Customer B are assigned to the group Tier 1 - CustomerB.
In the Conditions section: meet all of the following conditions - ticket status = new, organization = CustomerB
In the Actions section:
3. Tier 1 can escalate the ticket to Tier 2 group at which point omnichannel will assign the ticket to the most available agent in Tier 2 (base on availability and capacity). This is where I am unsure how to set the trigger to ensure omnichannel does the routing:
In the Conditions section: meet all of the following conditions
In the Actions section:
Can you confirm if the above trigger is correct?
Hi Uyen
There is only one auto routing tag - and so when you define that tag you just need to make sure for support (email, API, web form) tickets that this tag is attached to the ticket. Once it is, then any group you assign the ticket to, the ticket will be automatically routed in that group.
Barry
Barry Neary,
If there is only one auto routing tag, then will omnichannel routing kick off again in the second scenario:
Scenario 1: omnichannel initially assigns the ticket to Tier 1 team member. Tier 1 team then assigns the ticket to Tier 2 group. NOTE: by now the ticket already has the autou_route tag.
Scenario 2: omnichannel again assigns the open ticket to a Tier 2 member.
We are interested in using omnichannel to route it to a Tier 2 member base on availability and capacity of agents rather than have Tier 1 cherry pick who to give the tickets to in Tier 2 group. Don't know if it is possible to have omnichannel route again if it initially routed ticket to Tier 1 team.
Hi Uyen Nguyen
We are introducing overflow capability late this year/early next year where you can set it up so that it only goes to Tier 2 if tier 1 group is not available.
Barry Neary - will the feature only assign to Tier 2 if Tier 1 assigns it to Tier 2 group or is the assignment automatic (i.e. Tier 1 does not solve the ticket in a given timeframe then it automatically push to Tier 2 group)? We would prefer if Tier 1 push it to Tier 2 at which point Omnichannel will round robin the ticket assignment to Tier 2 (base on agent's capacity).
Hi Uyen Nguyen
It will be possible to configure it so that if Tier 1 is not available (e.g. they are all at capacity) , automatically assign ticket to an agent in the tier two group
Please sign in to leave a comment.