Automatically route chats to departments

What's my plan?

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.

Note: 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?