- Team and Growth don't support custom unified statuses. All of your product subscriptions (Support, Chat, and Talk) must be on Professional plans or above to use this feature.
- Professional supports up to five custom unified statuses.
- Enterprise supports up to 100 custom unified statuses.
Unified agent status is part of omnichannel routing and allows agents to control availability for Support, Talk, and Messaging from a single menu. There are four default agent statuses: online, away, transfers only, and offline, as well as a customizable fallback status that's used when agents are idle.
If you meet the requirements to use unified agent statuses and are on a Professional or Enterprise plan, admins can also define custom unified statuses to suit their workflows. When defining custom agent statuses, you can choose whether it's available to all agents in your account or only select groups of agents.
To add a custom agent status
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Agent statuses.
- On the Agent statuses page, click Create agent status.
- On the Create agent status page, configure the following:
- Name: Give the new status a short, unique name. The name can't exceed 100 characters. Dynamic content is supported if you want the status to be displayed in the agent's local language.
- Description: Optionally, give the new status a description that helps you identify it.
- Channel routing > Email: Define the agent's availability for incoming email tickets (including web form, side conversations, and API) when this custom status is active.
- Channel routing > Talk: Define the agent’s availability for incoming Talk calls when this custom status is active.
- Channel routing > Messaging: Define the agent's availability for incoming Messaging conversations when this custom status is active.
The Status section shows a preview of how your agent’s icons will look depending on the selected status.
- Under Groups, select one of the following options:
- All groups: Makes the custom status available to all agents in your account.
- Only selected groups. Restricts access to only the groups you select in the accompanying drop-down field.
Note: Custom statuses created prior to June 10, 2024 are available to all groups unless an admin edits the status to restrict access by group. After this date, admins must specify group accessibility for each status they create. - When you are finished, click Create agent status.
53 comments
Deniz Suat Oskaner
Could we report times in creating status? For example I need to know which agent how mant time spent in these status?
19
Holly Jania
Any updates to when this will be released to general ZD users?
3
Sandbox Daniel
Also interested in the ability to export report on time in the various status.
3
Brett Bowser
I can confirm that this is something our Explore team is looking into so stay tuned! I'd recommend following our Announcements page if you haven't done so already for any updates we have to share including new releases :) Zendesk Announcements
3
Felipe de Castro Jordão•
Are there any plans for the chat feature to be included in this beta test?
0
Dane
We are already transitioning to Messaging and we don't have any news yet if this will be available on the Classic Chat for this was primarily designed with Messaging and other main channels.
0
Zac Garcia
Alan apologies for the delay on replying to your question - could you describe the business rules you're concerned about creating a conflict for? Really, there is no risk of conflict, since the admin is creating a status like:
Status: Messaging Only (Support: Offline, Messaging: Online, Talk: Offline).
There's no risk of an agent going into a status that results in conflicting availabilities. If all channels are set to Online for a particular status (as with the forthcoming 'Online' status available in the EAP), it just means the agent will be able to receive inbound work from all three channels. I hope this helps but am happy to elaborate further!
0
Lauren Benkov
What exactly does "work is added to the queue" mean for the away status? If we're making a custom status called "meeting" and someone could theoretically be in it for 1 hr or more, would that be correct or should we use offline? I wouldn't want work queueing for an agent for a long time and not get assigned to someone else. Thanks!
0
Mau
Remember, when you create a custom agent status, you will have the ability to choose to define an agent's availability in Support and Messaging (online, away, transfer only, offline).
If you create a new status called “In meeting”, you probably don't want the most time-sensitive channels of work routed to agents with this status. In that case, you could set Email (Support) to online, and Messaging to away. That would result in agents with the “In meeting” status only receiving tickets generated from Support email.
You can also find this here.
0
Feng Gao
Hi there,
In case a ticket has been assigned to an agent, but the agent is on offline status, would there any impact on the SLA of this ticket?
0
Lila Kingsley
Can someone please clarify if custom agent statuses can be utilized on agent workspace independent of Omnichannel routing on an account using chat and not message? The article says custom agent states become available once omnichannel is enabled, but I am trying to understand if there is a way to use custom states without using omnichannel.
2
Holly Jania
It would be great to have agent statuses without omnichannel
5
Ирина Курда
Can you tell me if in the existing report on the status of agents we can see the status of "Transfer Only"?
3
Jen C
Lila and Holley,
I was told that you can enable omnichannel routing and then set the capacity to zero for each agent to prevent tickets from being auto-assigned/automatically routed. Then you can use the custom agent statuses. I am currently looking into this option in my sandbox environment to see if that would work as expected.
However, I don't see a way for me to view which custom status each of my agents is currently in. We may hold off until we can see a list of our agents and which status they are in and possibly the ability for an Admin to make changes to those statuses. Also, I don't see a way to report time spent in each status yet. :)
1
Artur Olchowik
Hi, is there a way to monitor agents' statuses from the admin perspective live time and manage it if needed? For example I've got an agent who's working but he set his status to `offline`. Am I able to change it if I'm a super user?
3
Dane
For Talk, Admin can change agent status on the Talk Dashboard.
It's not available for other Products. However, we already have it added on our roadmap where it will be integrated in our Live Dashboard. Please check the comment of our Community Manager.
0
Moss
Jen C did you have any luck with getting tickets to not assign to agents? We'd love to use the agent status for our team but don't want to automatically assign tickets to agents.
2
Steve Plichta
Moss Jen C,
I may be mistaken, but I believe all that you'd need to do in order to be able to use the custom agent statuses but NOT have anything automatically assign tickets to agents would be to NOT write any triggers that would add the auto-routing tag (shown in the screenshot below) to the ticket. At least, this was my plan for doing the same.
0
Jen C
Hi Steve,
We haven't enabled omnichannel routing yet. We had to wait to implement this feature because we need to be able to see a live list of our agents and which status they are currently in.
Currently, I can go into Zendesk Chat or Zendesk Talk and see what status our agents are in. From what I understand, if we switch to Omnichannel routing there was no way for me to see what status each agent was in, so I'd be in the dark on that. And no reports for how long each agent was in each status.
Also, currently any of our agents can go into Zendesk Talk and adjust the Talk status for an agent. This helps if an agent forgets to change their status and we can update it. This isn't as important in omnichannel routing as it will change an agent to inactive after 15 minutes of inactivity, but it would be nice to have an Admin be able to make changes to an agent's status, if needed.
For these reasons, we decided it was important to wait until at least we could see a list of agents and their current statuses under the omnichannel routing feature. I'm hoping someone can share if they have been successful at not having anything automatically assigned after implementing omnichannel routing.
Thanks! Jen
1
Artur Olchowik
Hi Jen!
we're using omnichannel routing for a month or so now and it's a great feature. I can see agents' statuses with no issues. I can see it either via explore and a live board there or via the Assignee field. See below how I can see it. All greens are online agents and whites are offline.
This showed only when I enabled the routing as I can't recall seeing it before.
In explore live data I can drill into each box which gives me more detailed data:
Drill in for online agents:
2
Jen C
Thank you Artur! That's so great! Looks like it might be time to try it out.
0
Steve Plichta
Are there plans to allow for the creation of more than 5 custom agent statuses?
0
shelley
Hi Steve Plichta, Did your theory on not setting up the trigger to avoid auto-assign work?
0
Steve Plichta
shelley I've tested my theory in our Sandbox, and everything seems to be ok there. Haven't been allowed to test it in production though, but I am optimistic.
0
Jorge Echevers
Hello All, is there a solution to run historical reports on the agent statuses?
It would also be great to have an accurate work-effort measurement (when agents are working in a certain interaction, without duplicates, only the one that is open in front of them). A combination of work efforts divided by active statuses would give out great productivity metrics insights.
0
Andy Seaman
Hey,
Is there any update on the agent status reports. I know it mentioned further up the thread, but there is no update.
1
Anne Ronalter
Unfortunately, custom agent statuses are not currently available for reporting. It is on our roadmap for a release this year, but we do not have a specific date for it yet.
When updates announced, they are detailed in our Zendesk release notes.
1
Venkat Bellamkonda
Jacquelyn Brewer - We are on the Enterprise plan but don't see Omnichannel Routing under Objects and Rules from Admin Center. What am I missing.
Venkat
Aviatrix Systems Inc
0
Karen Beltran
Hi Venkat Bellamkonda,
With regards to enabling Omnichannel Routing the account setup should meet the following setup below.
You can refer to this related article. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409149119514
• The Agent Workspace (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821259930) 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.
Further information is provided on your existing Support Ticket with us which is 11486615.
0
Denise Sehlmeyer
It would be nice if we were able to reorder the Agent status, so they don't have to scroll all the way to bottom for some statuses.
11