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
- From the dashboard, go to Manage > Triggers.
- Click Create Trigger.
- Set up your trigger's conditions and actions.
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:
- Set the
Still on sitecondition 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 Departmentaction and select a department.
- Set the
- Click Create Triggers.
The widget will display as available for chats even if the department set by the visitor tag (by the API or trigger) is offline. To display the widget when specific departments are online, see Can I configure the Web Widget (Classic) to present Chat on my webpage only when a specific department is online?
12 Comments
This needs an update @Aimee-Spanier
I'm having trouble getting chats into our Zendesk to route to the departments I've created.
I've made sure that the organisations to be routed are tagged correctly so each of their associated users should, as I understand it, carry that tag and then activate the trigger (details below).
The department only contains agents within the CEE group, but at the moment all agents in active chat sessions see ALL chat requests... Where am I going wrong?
Thanks in advance!
The org tags will add the tag directly on the tickets that will be created if the requester belongs to that specific org. However, it will not be utilized by the classic chat for triggers.
Chat triggers utilizes tags that was set by the Set Tag/Add Tag Chat triggers action.
The easiest way to go about this is to enable Agent Workspace so that you can utilize the org tags on every new tickets and route them to the appropriate groups.
Another option is to create additional triggers that will route your customers to the appropriate department. You can also utilize the Chat API to add tags to your customers which can then be utilized by the Chat triggers to route them to the correct department.
Hope this helps!
Hello Dane, when it comes to tag is it separated by comma? Can you add multiple tags under the condition:
Visitor tag>contains>class_a, class_b, class_c
Is this possible?
I have a similar issue although I managed to route tickets correctly to a department and based on skills.
However, any other agent out of this department can take the chat and maintain a conversation with the user. All our agent's are restricted to their own ticket groups/departments. This appears to work in Support but not in Chat.
Am I missing something?
Hi!
With shortcuts you can create questions messages with options for the customer as below:
My question is how to write into the trigger script to be able to send the same kind of messages to the customer because it is not proposed:
Best regards,
Raphael
Hello Team,
We have API running to tag visitor depending on their VIP Levels which is working perfectly fine but the department routing is NOT WORKING AT ALL.
This is the API reference we have used Chat API to add tags to ensure that we will be able to achieve the Visitor Tag and yes, all visitors are now being tagged but for some reason the trigger is not firing at all. If someone from Zendesk can help us please as this is very crucial for us to implement the live chat to all of our customers.
Apparently, the customer support team is not very helpful at all in resolving this matter.
It seems that the ticket you have requested is still on-hold is awaiting the result for a recommendation provided. Please continue to work with the Advocate handling the ticket as the issue you currently have cannot be easily resolved with just the information provided on this page.
We are on AWS - Chat.
Is it possible to route a chat based on the customers email address?
e.g. Customer clicks on Chat widget, customer enters name & email address, chat is then directed to chat group/agent that looks after that specific customer.
I have the same question as Shelley. We have groups that look after specific clients, but chats are going to the wrong groups. I can't find a way to get it to route based on the email address. We really need help with this please, as it is causing a lot of frustration for our clients and agents, and visitor tag doesn't seem to do it. Thanks, Steven.
This recommendation is for the Classic Chat Widget.
Natively, it's not possible to route chat tickets based on their email address. However, if you are using Agent Workspace, those users can be added into an organization so that it can be used as a condition on Support triggers to route their created tickets on a specific group. You can also tag those users so that the tags can also be used as a condition for created tickets.
One implementation that I have tried previously was to use the Chat API to add tags for specific users so that I can also utilize the Chat Triggers for it. However, this will be done by your dev.
Thanks for the reply Dane, that is helpful and good to know.
Regards,
Steven.
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