Omnichannel routing is a highly-configurable routing solution that can route tickets from email (including web form, side conversations, and API), calls, and messaging. Omnichannel routing provides the most sophisticated routing logic, which can increase agent efficiency and effectiveness. It works out of the box, but you'll get the most value if you take your time planning your routing configuration. Your routing configuration applies to all omnichannel routing queues.
Planning your routing configuration
Omnichannel routing works out of the box. As long as you already have a mechanism in place to assign incoming tickets to groups, such as triggers, omnichannel routing can start routing calls and messaging conversations as soon as it's turned on and email tickets as soon as the auto-routing tag is added to them. Therefore, when you turn on omnichannel routing or adjust your configuration routing, it's best to have a detailed plan ahead of time.
To plan out your omnichannel routing configuration
- (Optional) To make the most informed decisions about your routing configuration settings, you might want to consider the questions posed in Best practices: Planning your routing workflow.
- On all plan types, do the following:
- Email tickets (including web form, side conversations, and API) must have a unique routing tag to be routed through the standard omnichannel routing queue. However, the auto-routing tag isn't needed to route email tickets through custom routing queues, unless they don't match to any custom queues and you want them to get picked up by the standard omnichannel routing queue. Decide what your routing tag will be.
- You probably already use triggers to assign tickets to groups. If you're using the standard omnichannel routing queue, you need to ensure one or more triggers have an action to add the routing tag to any email tickets you want routed by omnichannel routing. The group assignment and auto-routing tag aren't required for tickets that are routed through custom queues. See Requirements for the routing triggers. Decide if you are going to modify existing triggers to function as routing triggers, or create new ones.
- Before you turn on omnichannel routing, you need to define capacity rules to balance the assigned work between agents. There is a built-in capacity rule that is enabled by default, but you can define alternative rules that better meet your unique needs. Decide what capacity rules you will need. For each rule, decide what the capacities will be for each channel and which agents will be assigned to the rule.
- Review the standard unified agent statuses. When you turn on omnichannel routing, standard agent statuses are automatically available for agents to use across channels. The standard agent statuses can't be edited, but it's important to understand how they're configured.
- How do you want to handle it when messaging conversations and calls are routed to agents but they don't accept it? Are you going to turn on messaging reassignment timing, where a messaging ticket is reassigned to a different team member if not addressed within the specified timing?
- How do you want agents to see the email tickets they've been assigned by omnichannel routing? Should they use a view to see what's been assigned to them, or should the email tickets open in a new tab, similar to messaging conversations?
- On Professional and Enterprise plans, you'll also need to decide the
following:
- When you turn on omnichannel routing, it's configured to use a the
standard omnichannel routing queue that routes work from all
channels to the ticket's assigned group. However, we recommend creating custom queues to
route tickets that meet specific conditions to multiple primary and
secondary (fallback) groups. Decide if you need additional queues,
what their conditions will be, and which groups will be primary and
secondary. See Understanding how omnichannel
routing uses queues to route work to
agents.Note: Creating additional queues might require adjustments to your triggers for them to continue working correctly to help you route work into the appropriate queues.
- What unified agent statuses are you going to use? Just the standard agent statuses or custom statuses, too? For each custom status, what will be the name of the status and what will be the per-channel statuses?
- Are you routing based on ticket priority? If so, what triggers are you going to use to add and manage priority on tickets?
- Are you using skills? If so, what skills are you going to define and which agents have them? What routing rules or triggers are you going to use to add and manage skills on tickets? Do you want to fallback to routing without regard to skills if agents with the skills aren't available? If so, which skills are always required, and which are optional?
- (Enterprise plans only) Are you going to turn on call offering time limits, which acts as a reassignment time threshold for incoming calls?
- How do you want to handle re-opened email and messaging tickets if the agent has certain statuses? For which statuses would you want to reassign email tickets? For which statuses would you want to reassign messaging tickets?
- When you turn on omnichannel routing, it's configured to use a the
standard omnichannel routing queue that routes work from all
channels to the ticket's assigned group. However, we recommend creating custom queues to
route tickets that meet specific conditions to multiple primary and
secondary (fallback) groups. Decide if you need additional queues,
what their conditions will be, and which groups will be primary and
secondary. See Understanding how omnichannel
routing uses queues to route work to
agents.
Editing the routing configuration
After you turn on omnichannel routing and set your routing tag, your final step is to configure how it distributes the messages. An initial routing configuration is supplied with omnichannel routing. You can edit this at any time to suit your needs.
To set up a routing configuration
-
In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Routing
configuration.
- On the Routing Configuration page, click Edit next to the Initial routing configuration.
- On the Initial routing configuration page, you can see the name and description for the routing configuration.
- Configure the following routing options:
- Turn on skills-based routing: (Professional plans and above for Zendesk Suite, Support, Talk, and Chat) Routes tickets to agents with matching skills who also have an eligible status and spare capacity. When using skills to route tickets, we recommend also configuring a skills timeout.
- Turn on messaging activity routing: Determines whether inactive messaging tickets are counted towards agent capacity and how inactive tickets are routed to agents.
- Automatically open email tickets: Determines whether newly assigned email tickets are opened in a new tab for the agent. Regardless of this setting, agents receive a notification that a new ticket has been assigned to them.
- Turn on auto-accept for messaging: Determines whether messaging tickets are offered to agents or automatically assigned to them.
- Turn on messaging reassignment timing: (Professional plans and above for Zendesk Suite, Support, and Chat) Reassigns work to a different team member if it isn’t addressed in the time you specify.
- Turn on reassign reopened tickets: (Professional plans and above for Zendesk Suite, Support, and Chat) Reassigns email and messaging tickets if the assigned agent has a specified status when the ticket status changes from Solved, Pending, or On-hold back to Open.
- Turn on focus mode: Assigns an agent work from one real-time channel at a time. Email tickets aren't included in this restriction.
- When you are finished, click Save.
Skills based routing
On Professional plans and above, you can choose to route tickets to agents with matching skills who also have an eligible status and spare capacity. To use this feature you must have defined skills for your account and a way to assign skills to tickets. When using ticket triggers to assign skills to tickets, you have the ability to specify whether each skill is required or optional. Skills marked as required can't time out and are always part of the criteria for routing the ticket to an agent, but optional skills stop being considered for routing purposes when a skills timeout occurs.
If you turn on skills-based routing, we recommend also configuring a skills timeout. When a timeout is configured, work may be assigned to agents without the optional skills if none of the agents with all of the skills are available at the time. If you don't turn on the skills timeout, email and messaging tickets with skills remain in the queue indefinitely until an agent with all of the matching skill becomes available, and calls remain in the queue until the maximum queue wait time is reached and the call is sent to voicemail.
See About using skills to route tickets.
- Select Turn on skills-based routing.
- (Recommended) Select Turn on skills timeout and configure your
timeout thresholds per channel.
- Email: The skills timeout threshold for email tickets. The default is one hour.
- Messaging: The skills timeout threshold for messaging conversation. The default is 30 seconds. This also applies to chats in some circumstances.
- Talk: The skills timeout threshold for calls. The default is 30 seconds.
Messaging activity routing
On Team plans and above, you can choose whether to count all open active and inactive messaging tickets towards an agent's capacity or only active messaging tickets. When selected active and inactive messaging tickets are counted and offered to agents through the Accept button. When not selected, only active messaging tickets are counted towards capacity and offered to agents through the Accept button; inactive messages are automatically assigned to a previously-offered agent or other available agent. See Understanding how capacity rules work for messaging conversations and live chats.
- Select Turn on messaging activity routing.
Automatically opening email tickets
You can choose whether a newly assigned email ticket is automatically opened in a new tab for the assigned agent, similar to messaging conversations. Regardless of this setting, the agent receives a notification of the assignment. If you choose not to automatically open email tickets, it's a good idea to have agents use views to monitor the tickets assigned to them.
- Select Automatically open assigned email tickets.
Auto-accept messaging tickets
Typically, messaging conversations are offered to agents rather than automatically assigned. On Team plans and above, you can configure omnichannel routing to automatically assign messaging tickets to agents instead of offering them. This also applies to chats in some circumstances.
This feature can't be used at the same time as messaging reassignment timing.
- Select Turn on auto-accept for messaging.
Messaging reassignment timing
On Professional plans and above, you can configure omnichannel routing to reassign messaging tickets to a different team member if the assigned agent hasn't addressed it in the time you specify. When messaging reassignment timing is enabled, a specified time, in seconds, can elapse before work is reassigned to another agent. The timing is 30 seconds on Professional plans, and customizable on Enterprise plans. This also applies to chats in some circumstances.
This feature can't be used at the same time as auto-accept for messaging.
- Select Messaging timing (seconds).
The timing is 30 seconds on Professional plans.
- (Enterprise plans only) Enter the Messaging timing in seconds.
Reassign reopened tickets
On Professional plans and above, you can choose to reassign email and messaging tickets if the assigned agent has a specified status when a ticket's status changes from Solved, Pending, or On-hold back to Open. If you are using custom ticket statuses, this applies to all custom ticket statuses in the Solved, Pending, or On-hold status categories.
- Select Turn on reassignment for reopened tickets.
- Select the agent statuses for which you want to reassign reopened Email tickets. This reassignment behavior applies to all email tickets with the routing tag, even if the ticket wasn't originally assigned by omnichannel routing.
- Select the agent statuses for which you want to reassign reopened Messaging tickets. This also applies to chats in some circumstances.
Focus mode
On Team plans and above, you can configure omnichannel routing to help agents focus when handling tickets from real-time channels (calls, messaging conversations, and live chats). When you turn on focus mode, omnichannel routing only assigns an agent work from one real-time channel at a time. For more information, see About focus mode.
Email tickets aren't included in this restriction and can still be assigned while agents address more time-sensitive tickets from other channels.
- Select Turn on focus mode.
Configuring omnichannel routing to route tickets based on priority
On Professional and Enterprise plans, omnichannel routing automatically considers ticket priority if it's set. All you have to do is set a ticket's priority before it is assigned to an agent. We recommend using triggers to automatically set the ticket's priority when it enters the queue. This can be done with the same routing triggers you're already using to assign groups and the routing tag, or separate triggers.
- Create a new trigger or edit an existing one.
- Add conditions to define the tickets you want to set the priority for.
- Add an action Ticket > Priority and select the priority value you want to assign.
Evolving your routing configuration
- Are your reassignment timeouts correct? If your agents often have spare capacity, you could try reducing these thresholds. If they are typically at capacity with a large queue of work waiting for an available agent, reducing the threshold probably isn't a great idea.
- Is your ticket prioritization working for each channel? Are any adjustments needed?
- Are your unified agent statuses still meeting your needs? Have you noticed any trends in agent productivity based on their status usage? If you aren't using custom agent statuses, would they be helpful to you?
- Has anything changed for you organizationally that should be reflected in our routing configuration, triggers, or other business rules?
When you need to adjust your routing configuration, see Editing the routing configuration.