About omnichannel routing with unified agent status

Omnichannel routing with unified agent status allows you to direct tickets from email (including web form, side conversations, and API), calls, and messaging 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 means agents can set a single unified status for all channels, and important tickets are assigned to the agents who are most available to work on them. This provides the following benefits:

• Agents can respond to tickets faster
• You can prioritize work from high-value customers, including calls
• Agents are automatically assigned tickets and don’t have to go looking for them
• Agents can’t "cherry pick" the tickets they want to work on
• Agents can work on multiple ticket channels at once
• You can route calls to specific groups of agents based on the caller's country code of callers or other attributes

You can use capacity rules to limit the amount of work that’s assigned to agents at one time. However, regardless of these rules, agents can assign themselves work in excess of these limits if they want to (see Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads).

With omnichannel routing, instead of setting status individually by channel, agents can set a single unified status for Support, Talk, and Messaging. On Professional plans and above, admins can also define their own custom statuses such as “Out to lunch” or “In a meeting.” This can assist you when deciding how you want to route work items (calls, tickets, and messages) based on the agent status and capacity. See Adding unified agent statuses.

To use omnichannel routing, you have to turn it on and configure it. If you decide to stop using it, you can turn it off.

This article contains the following sections:

• Requirements and limitations of omnichannel routing
• How omnichannel routing works
• Summary of features
• Related articles

Requirements and limitations of omnichannel routing

There are a few requirements for using omnichannel routing, as well as some limitations you should consider before enabling the feature.

Requirements

Your account must meet the following requirements to use omnichannel routing:

• The Agent Workspace must be activated for your account.
• If your account has a Chat subscription, native messaging or Sunshine Conversations must also be activated.
• You can't be using live chat.

Limitations

Omnichannel routing with unified agent status currently has the following limitations:

• Omnichannel routing can't be enabled if you’re using live chat. Only Messaging is supported.
• Broadcast and hybrid modes for messaging aren't supported.
• Focus mode isn't supported.
• The ability to set an agent's status if they don't accept a number of message assignments, known as automatic idle, isn't supported yet.
• When using agent statuses, operating hours won't automatically set an agent's status.
• Light agents can't be assigned tickets and can't set a status.
• The ability to change a Talk agent’s status from the Talk dashboard, mobile apps, or by using the Talk APIs isn't supported. Integrations that use Talk APIs to change agent statuses might also be impacted.
• The ability to set up multiple call routing fallback groups in Talk settings for a single line or IVR keypress isn’t supported with omnichannel routing. However, if you use skills with omnichannel routing, you can achieve something similar by configuring the skills timeout settings. When using skills, calls are routed to an agent with matching skills first and, only if the skills timeout is reached, "overflows" to other agents in the same group without the skills.
• Tickets are created for all calls as soon as they enter the queue. The setting “Create tickets for abandoned calls” is no longer available.
  Tip: You can create a workflow to automatically close tickets created for abandoned calls.
• If call forwarding is enabled and the status of an agent is automatically set to offline because the agent has been disconnected, calls to the agent will no longer be forwarded to the agent’s phone.
• Explore dashboards will show per channel agent statuses but not unified custom statuses.
• At the time omnichannel routing is activated, agent statuses can get into an inconsistent state. It is important to manually set every agent's unified status to offline initially, then allow them to set their own status after that. For more information, see Agent statuses are changing to online when enabling omnichannel routing.
• When using priority phone numbers in Talk, call tickets are assigned High priority but aren't necessarily put directly at the top of the queue.
• Talk Partner Edition isn't supported. The way you route calls for Talk Partner Edition depends on the integration you're using.

How omnichannel routing works

When you use omnichannel routing, tickets are generated for all channels of work when they enter the queue, enabling you to run triggers on them, including incoming calls. For brevity, channels of work are labeled as Email (including tickets generated from email, web form, side conversations, and API), Messaging, and Talk. Email tickets enter the omnichannel routing queue only after the routing tag is added to them; messaging conversations and calls enter the queue as soon as they are received.

Omnichannel routing routes work to agents based on the following:

• Availability. This is defined by the single unified status the agent sets across channels.
• Capacity for each work channel. You define the maximum capacity for each channel and decide which tickets are eligible for routing.
• Skills. This is defined by the skills assigned to agents and tickets and applies to all channels.

Then triggers are used to assign the tickets to groups, assign a ticket priority, and add a routing tag to the ticket. The following table shows the order in which tickets are routed to agents:

Plan	Order in which tickets are routed
Suite Team and Growth	Tickets are assigned to agents in the order they are added to the queue.
Suite Professional and Enterprise	The ticket with the highest priority and oldest timestamp for entering the queue, is routed to an agent within the assigned group who has matching skills (if using), an eligible status, and the most spare capacity.

More specifically, tickets are assigned to agents based on the following:

1. Agent's status for the channel:
   • Email tickets: An agent must have a status of online or away to receive email tickets.
   • Messaging conversations: An agent must have a status of online to receive messaging tickets. See Setting your agent status with omnichannel routing.
   • Calls: An agent must have a status of online to receive incoming call tickets.

   If an agent forgets to set their status to offline, the status of the agent is automatically set to offline or away, as defined by an admin, when one of the following events is detected:

   • An agent closes the Agent Workspace without signing out (by closing down their computer or browser window or putting their computer to sleep)
   • An agent’s connection is lost due to a network outage
   • An agent is idle for longer than the idle status threshold defined by admins

   See Setting your unified agent status with omnichannel routing.

2. Agent's spare capacity for that channel:
   • An agent must have fewer open tickets or messaging conversations than the defined maximum capacity for that channel to have spare capacity. See Creating capacity rules to balance agent workload.
   • If more than one agent has an eligible status and spare capacity, the agent with the highest spare capacity for the relevant channel is assigned.
   • If more than one agent has an eligible status and the same spare capacity for the relevant channel, the ticket is assigned to the agent who hasn't been assigned a ticket in the longest time.
   • To be assigned an inactive messaging ticket (more than 10 minutes without a reply), an agent must have spare capacity. Whether inactive messaging tickets count towards an agent's capacity depends on your routing configuration.
3. Agent's skills:
   • An agent must have the same skills as the ticket in addition to having an eligible status and spare capacity.
   • If you select Skills timeout, tickets will be assigned without regard to skills if an agent with the matching skills is unavailable for a specified duration after a ticket reaches the top of the queue. If this option isn't selected, tickets will sit in the queue until an agent with the matching skills becomes available or a call reaches the maximum time in queue and is sent to voicemail.

Here's an example of a scenario for omnichannel routing:

1. An important VIP end user has an urgent issue that needs to be resolved.
2. They submit a ticket using the email channel.
3. The account admin has set up a trigger for the account to add the auto-routing tag to these tickets and then assign a group, priority, and skills.
4. As a result of this trigger, the end user's ticket automatically routes to a specific group with an urgent priority and the skill German.
5. Omnichannel routing now assesses the ticket based on agent skills, status, and capacity.
6. The routing system first understands that three agents are available for work.
7. Second, it identifies that two of the agents have the skill (German language) required for the ticket.
8. Finally, it finds which of those two agents has the most spare capacity for emails and assigns the ticket to this agent.

Reassigning messages and calls in omnichannel routing

Messaging conversations and calls require time-sensitive responses. Therefore, omnichannel routing has special reassignment logic for each.

Reassigning messaging conversations

With reassignment timing, a message can be reassigned to another agent in the group if the original agent does not take the message within a specific time threshold. The default threshold is 30 seconds. On Enterprise and above, that threshold can be customized.

The reassignment timing setting must be turned on during setup to reassign messages automatically if they aren’t accepted within the specified time. If that setting isn’t enabled, the routing engine will keep trying the same agent.

Reassigning incoming calls

When a call is offered to an agent, they can choose to accept or decline it. If the agent declines the call or doesn't answer within 30 seconds, the call is returned to the queue and assigned to another available agent. The call will continue to be offered to available agents in a round-robin fashion until the maximum queue waiting time expires.

Because call tickets are created as soon as the call enters the queue, admins can create a view in Support that shows details about waiting calls. To create such a view, use at least the following conditions:

• Hours since created > (calendar) Less than >1
• Status > Less than >Solved
• Channel > is > Phone call (incoming)

Summary of features

Omnichannel routing has a broad scope, so here's a quick reference of features and functionality.

Channels supported by omnichannel routing

At a high level, omnichannel routing can be used to route tickets from email, messaging, and calls. However, in business rules, these categories of tickets are broken down into via types. The following lists show the supported via types (referred to as channels) as they appear in Admin Center business rule conditions.

Email tickets

• Email
• Web form
• Web service (API)
• Closed ticket
• Facebook post
• Twitter
• Web widget
• Mobile SDK
• Side conversation
• Merge
• Any channel

Messaging conversations

• Native messaging
• LINE
• SMS
• Facebook Messenger
• Telegram
• Twitter Direct Message
• WeChat
• WhatsApp
• Google RCS
• Apple Business Chat
• Google Business Messages
• KakaoTalk
• Instagram Direct Messenger
• Sunshine Conversations API

Calls

• Phone call (incoming)
• Phone call (outgoing)

Summary of features by plan

The availability of omnichannel routing features varies by plan level. The following applies to your Zendesk Suite plan level, or to the plan level of all individual products:

Team	Growth	Professional	Enterprise
Routing email, messaging and call tickets	Routing email, messaging and call tickets	Routing email, messaging, and call tickets	Routing email, messaging, and call tickets
Routing based on capacity and agent status	Routing based on capacity and agent status	Routing based on capacity, agent status, and skills	Routing based on capacity, agent status, and skills
Default unified agent statuses	Default unified agent statuses	Default unified agent statuses	Default unified agent statuses
		Routing based on priority	Routing based on priority
		Up to 5 custom statuses	Up to 100 custom statuses
		Message reassignment	Customizable reassignment time

Related articles

See the following articles for more information to help you get up and running with omnichannel routing and agent statuses:

• Turning on omnichannel routing
• Managing your omnichannel routing configuration
• Creating capacity rules to balancing agent workload
• About unified agent statuses
• Adding unified agent statuses
• Managing unified agent statuses
• About using skills to route tickets