Capacity rules are part of omnichannel routing that help you balance your team workload by setting capacities on automatically assigned work. For example, you could specify that only ten open email tickets at a time can be assigned to particular agents. This can be a great way of ensuring that your less experienced agents are not assigned too much work while they ramp up.
Omnichannel routing comes with a default capacity rule that you can use as-is or edit. Admins can also create your own capacity rules to suit your needs. Agents are always assigned to whichever capacity rule you set as the default initially, but you can change their assignment if needed. An agent can only be assigned to one capacity rule, so if you assign an agent to a new rule, they are automatically unassigned from their current one.
Adding capacity rules
Omnichannel routing comes with a built-in capacity rule to get you started, but you can add additional rules as required. You must be an admin to create and manage capacity rules.
To add a capacity rule
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Capacity rules.
- On the Capacity rules page, click Add capacity rule.
- On the Add capacity rule page, provide the following information:
- Name: Enter a descriptive name for the capacity rule.
- Description: Optionally, enter a description that helps you to identify the capacity rule.
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Set as default: New team members are automatically assigned to the default capacity rule. Team members who are already assigned to a capacity rule won’t change.
Note: If you create a new capacity rule and assign a team member to it, they are removed from the default capacity rule. If you delete a capacity rule, all team members assigned to it are assigned back to the default rule.
- Assignees: Click Add assignee to specify the agents to whom this rule applies.
- Capacities > Email: Enter the number of open email tickets that can be assigned to an agent at one time. This includes all open email tickets, regardless of how they were assigned to the agent. Tickets that are pending or on hold are not counted towards capacity. (Maximum 500)
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Capacities > Messaging: Enter the number of messaging tickets that can be assigned to an agent at one time. Inactive messaging tickets are counted if messaging activity routing is selected. Otherwise, only active messaging tickets are considered. This capacity also applies to chats in some circumstances. When applicable to live chats, an agent can be assigned up to this number of live chats and this number of messaging conversations at the same time. (Maximum 500)
See Understanding how capacity rules work for messaging conversations and live chats.
- Capacities > Talk: Enter the number of call tickets that can be assigned to an agent at one time. Options are 0 or 1. If you choose 0, the agents cannot receive calls. Calls are no longer counted towards an agent's capacity after the wrap-up time ends, if configured, or after the agent hangs up.
- When you are finished, click Add capacity rule.
Your new capacity rule is displayed on the Capacity rules page and begins to work immediately.
Understanding how capacity rules work for messaging conversations and live chats
- The value you specify for Messaging capacity applies to both messaging conversations and live chats separately. If you specify a messaging capacity of 3, agents could be assigned up to 3 messaging conversation tickets and 3 live chats simultaneously.
- In conversations, there is a concept of active and inactive tickets. Zendesk defines a messaging conversation as inactive when an end user hasn't sent a reply in the last 10 minutes.
The standard configuration for omnichannel routing counts only active messaging conversations and live chats towards an agent's capacity. With this configuration, agents can have any number of inactive messaging conversations and live chats assigned to them in addition to the specified capacity of live conversations for those channels. If their assigned inactive conversations become active again, agents will exceed the specified capacity and omnichannel routing won't assign them any new tickets for that channel until they have spare capacity again. This approach works for some workflows, but can make it challenging for agents to balance their workloads. In that case, admins can select the messaging activity routing setting in their omnichannel routing configuration if they want to count active and inactive conversational tickets equally towards agent capacity. When messaging activity routing is selected, new conversational support tickets are assigned to agents only when their total number of assigned messaging and live chat tickets, respectively, are below the specified capacity.