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Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads



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Jacquelyn Brewer

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Sep 09, 2024


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52 comments

The point with Round Robin assignment is fairness in ticket assignment.. simply based on Capacity penalizes hard working engineers cycling through their tickets +  can encourage bad behaviour (aka keeping tickets open longer than expected to avoid receiving the next one) . For the other point above how should round robin distribution be based.. we do mostly per day and per business week (for orgs with higher volume, an option for per hour should be provided), this is simply because ticket volume usually cannot be predicted and to even out distribution if there is a festive day preventing a group to receive tickets a particular day etc…

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Could we get another update / ETA from Product Management on the Round Robin feature for OmniChannel ? This is a basic feature one would expect Zendesk to have. At present, I cannot see how anyone can leverage the automated Omni-channel capacity for a fair distribution of tickets.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi

Its looking like Q3, potentially Q4

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Thanks - Could we be part of an EAP (Early Adopter Program) for this when it opens? We are on the verge of deciding renewal with Zendesk or not: This feature is a major roadblock at this stage for a Go or No Go further with Zendesk

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Barry Neary that's disappointing. Frankly, this whole conversation is disappointing. The problem with the application as it's built now, is you're trying to determine how a company handles their day to day ticketing process when you know nothing of the variables that help inform a team if such a feature can be utilized. In reality, you should be providing a basic feature kit that is industry standard and THEN customize it. You're working backwards and we're been telling Zendesk for the last 3 years what we want out of this specific feature and you're still not listening. Forcing users to a 3rd party app that costs money that you're probably getting a kickback on, is greedy and not good optics.

 

Makes me think very hard on whether or not I want to renew this product this year.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Pascal Turmel 

We will likely go straight to GA with this.

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Hi

How do I exclude users from the capacity rules? I see no option to delete them?

Scenario: We have had to use an agent license for our Jira integration. We do not want any tickets to be assigned to this user. Is there a way to do this that does not involve a trigger?

 

Similarly, we have a lot of light agents who have all been allocated to the default capacity rule, if tickets cannot be assigned to light agents, why are they available to be added to Capacity Rules and included in the default, pre-configured rule where I cannot delete them?

 

Thanks

 

James

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi James Skene 

 

You can create a capacity rule that has 0 max capacities for all channels, then assign the agent to this rule, This will ensure they wont be routed anything.

 

Its on our roadmap to exclude light agents from capacity rules

 

Barry

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We've got a scenario where agents are logging on in the morning, setting themselves online and finding that they have 10-15 Open tickets in their Home page due to customer replies. Their capacity is 5 by default, but this means that Urgent tickets (with an SLA First Reply Time of 1 hour) aren't getting assigned by omni-channel until the number of replies in Agent Home has dropped below 5. 
Is there any way to work around this, i.e. prioritise new tickets with certain criteria or differentiate between New and Open tickets? 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi D.Fitz 

One option is to reassign tickets that are reopened while the agent is offline. Another would be to increase the max capacity for these agents. A third could be for agents to change the status of their lower priority tickets to on hold so they can be assigned new higher priority tickets and then go back to the other tickets lster

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I have a question regarding the capacity:

 

I'm creating a rule for premium service, and for that we want agents to take only 5 tickets (tickets here being considered talk + messaging + email) at a time. So, let's say that, one of the agents are currently on a call, he can get 4 other tickets (messaging or email) but will only receive a new ticket (could also be a call) after the current call is done. Is there a way to do that?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Myra, currently the capacity is per channel rather than across all channels. This has been logged as a potential roadmap item. Barry

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Hi All,

I've opened a support ticket on this, but as I only want to apply an OCR rule for one group of agents (8 to be exact), does anyone know if is there a way to ensure all other instance full agents are not part of the OCR configuration?  My plan is to deploy this for one use case, that would apply to one specific ticket group.   I ensured the capacity rule I wanted only had 8 agents, and wanted to delete the other default rule that had 300+ other agents, but it forced a move of those 300+ agents to my other rule.  I don't want those 300+ agents involved at all.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jimmy Rufo 

You can have two rules - one for the 8 agents and the other for the rest. The one for the rest: if you set capacity to zero for this one then these other agents wont be automatically assigned tickets

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Thanks Barry Neary , that makes sense, and I will try it.

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Hi Barry Neary, regarding your comment reply to D. Fitz on Nov 5. Are there any plans in the future to implement some improvements to cater for this scenario? It would be nice to have some configuration on these tickets that were already replied to that were there before agent signed in (to automatically move to On-Hold so they can receive the more time pressing tickets) or another method. 

 

Currently we are experiencing a similar problem and we've set up some automations to unassign tickets after being held for some time and changing priorities when the SLA is about to breached, though it is more of a workaround for now.  Increasing the capacity isn't really the best solution since:

- If people sign on too early, they get all the nearly SLA breached tickets. Even though who sign on a few minutes afterwards may not get some of that workload and they would need to wait for a team leader to sign on to reassign tickets manually.

- Or people who sign on a little later may not receive any tickets since everyone has higher capacity. They need a team leader to reassign tickets to them manually. 

 

Thanks.

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Hi Barry Neary , for the rule with the 300+ agents with 0 capacity, would those agents have to adjust to having to set an agent status when navigating to the agent interface?  Since they are not going to be active for OCR at this time, I would want to ensure they don't have to adhere to a workflow that is irrelevant to them, and could prevent them from receiving tickets.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

HI Jimmy Rufo 

Those agents with zero max capacity will not be assigned tickets, independent of what their agent status is set to. So those agents can just ignore their agent status

 

Barry

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Hi Barry Neary ,

 

I think there is a misunderstanding here.  The ~200 agents not using OCR will still NEED to be assigned tickets, just not in an OCR capacity, if that makes sense.  The tickets would get assigned manually to them or via transfer of ticket to their ticket group.  In that respect, I'd want them to not have to worry about agent status and receive tickets manually as they always had.  I have only 8 agents or so that I want to test OCR with, and dealing with the other 200 agents is proving problematic.  I'd love to speak with someone close to this feature to find a way to get this implemented, as I've had so many stops and starts.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jimmy Rufo 

Sorry for the confusion: the agents with zero capacity can still be assigned support tickets manually either self assiginging from views or being manually assigned tickets from supervisors. Its the routing engine that will not assign them tickets

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Hi Barry Neary ,

My recent concern was specific to agent status toggling, of which there is no documentation regarding if they will default to “Online”, “Offline”, if a default can be set for agents in a particular capacity rule, etc.  I know we are meeting on Monday, so may be best to clear this all up early next week.  Thanks.

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Jimmy Rufo

Zendesk Luminary

Hi Barry Neary , thanks for the update today.  If you or Cory Vegel could refer to me to the post discussing the feature to “stagger” OCR related ticket assignments over time, that would be great!

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