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 (Support, Messaging, and Talk). 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:
If you're not using omnichannel routing, see Setting your Talk agent status and Setting your conversation status.
About unified agent statuses
Unified agent statuses are used to inform routing behavior for tickets from Support, Messaging, and Talk. There are four default unified statuses for agents:
- Online - Tickets from Talk, Messaging, and Support can be routed to the agent.
- Away - Only Support 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 (Support) to online, and Messaging and Talk to away. That would result in agents with the “In meeting” status only receiving tickets generated from Support 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 in the Agent Workspace for Support, Messaging, and Talk. 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.
18 Comments
Is there a way for an admin to change an agent's status? For example, if an agent forgets to change their status before they sign off and they are off the next day, we want to be able to change them to offline to prevent further tickets from routing to them.
Thank you Dave. Is this on the path to be developed? I would think that there would be others who would be interested in this feature.
I agree with Jyl, having this as a feature so the admins can step in and manually change the agent's status would be a great advantage.
I'm not sure if this is on the roadmap -- for the best visibility to our product team, can one of you post to our Feedback - Ticketing System (Support) topic using this template?
I have submitted this feedback item.
I'm noticing that for tickets, Agent status is not always respected. For instance:
I also notice that the configured Availability in the Zendesk Out of Office app is not respected, and users who should be OFFLINE (haven't signed in) and are set as Unavailable are still assigned tickets. The ZD Out of Office app does not prevent users from being assigned tickets by Routing.
I have been trying to communicate this to Zendesk Support for a week now, but they keep saying "Oh those agents are OFFLINE".
I know, that's the problem.
John do you have support available 24h/7? I've noticed that when my company's out of hours then agents aren't assigned any tickets regardless of the status they put themselves in.
Also, at the point of turning the omnichannel routing on I had to ask all agents to re-log into Zendesk so they were in a correct status and so they don't get assigned tickets.
Hey @Kat we have it set up for 6am-6pm. I would hope being outside of business hours would stop the ticket assignment, so I guess that's good!
Yeah, having all agents re-login makes sense. I'm just testing this out in my Sandbox for right now, but what I'm really concerned with is that it's not doing what it should be doing. Then to add that there's no way to manage for Agents who aren't able to just re-login (if they're on vacation, etc) or folks who are just out of office, that gets worrisome.
And then of course still getting tickets assigned to Offline agents.
Admins should be able to see the custom agent statuses in the Talk Dashboard and change the status, if required. It would be great to have this ability as soon as possible. Please advise.
Is there a place for Admins or Managers to see who's online or agents current statuses?
Lauren, we found that when you go to the Assignee field and can see agents from there, it does show who is Online and not with the little colored dot next to their name. Not a great way, but it's something.
Unfortunately, it's still a huge issue that Admins have no ability to change the status of agents.
Where can I fond the reporting for Agent status? How long they've been in each status, etc. Also where can I find what status all my agents are in currently? (Live reporting)
Hi Eduardo -
Here's some information on how to see live agent status:
Seeing live agent status and activities
Let us know if that helps or if you need something more.
Nicole Saunders Thanks! That helps!
Any progress on Admins being able to update or set the agent status? We'd also like to control the status based on an agents schedule so tickets aren't assigned to an agent at the end of the day before they are about to be out of office for two days.
Can we disable "Transfer Only" our Agents misusing it to not receive E-Mails, instead of Away.
There are two options on how to change the agent status to offline:
You can also visit this article for more information.
Hi Tobias,
There's currently no option to disable the "Transfer Only" status. I encourage you to create a new post in the Support Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds.
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