When omnichannel routing is enabled for your account, agents working in the Zendesk Agent Workspace can set a single, unified status across multiple Zendesk channels (email, messaging, and voice). The status set by the agent determines when and what type of tickets from these channels can be routed to them with omnichannel routing.
Light agents can't use unified agent statuses.
This article contains the following topics:
About unified agent statuses
Unified agent statuses are used to inform routing behavior for tickets from email, messaging, and voice. There are four standard unified statuses for agents:
- Online - Tickets from voice, messaging, and email can be routed to the agent.
- Away - Only email tickets can be routed to the agent.
- Transfer only - Only tickets that have already been reviewed and need to be transferred to the agent can be routed to them.
- Offline - No tickets can be routed to the agent.
On Professional and Enterprise plans, admins can create additional custom unified statuses for agents to use. When an admin creates custom statuses, they define one of the default statuses for each channel that will be applied when an agent uses the custom status. For example, if an admin creates a new status called “In meeting”, they probably don't want the most time-sensitive channels of work routed to agents with this status. In that case, they could set email to online, and messaging and voice to away. That would result in agents with the “In meeting” status only receiving tickets generated from email.
Make sure you understand how to use any custom unified statuses that are available for you to use.
Setting your status
Agents set a single status for email, messaging, and voice. Before you start setting your agent status, consider the following:
- When using unified agent statuses, chat operating hours won't automatically set your messaging status.
- It's important that you set your status to offline before any periods of
inactivity, such as signing off for the day. Your status is only inferred if 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
To set your status
- In the ticket interface, click your profile icon in the top bar and
select the status you want from the profile menu.
