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Managing your omnichannel routing configuration



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Jacquelyn Brewer

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Jan 23, 2025


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140 comments

Thanks Barry Neary. What is the timelines for voicemails?

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Skills timeout for messaging needs more work. It should evaluate if there is anyone online with the skill and if not automatically drop the skill before even using omnichannel to assign to an agent. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Tim M

Just to confirm, you want there to be no delay between there being no available agent with the right skill and the dropping of that skill? If so, I believe you can reduce the skills timeout down to a sec or two?

We are addressing the limitation that an agent needs to do something after the skill is dropped to be assigned the ticket 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Zach Gilbert

I am not sure, Rohan Gupta can perhaps answer that one....

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Barry Neary

That is exactly it. we set it to 1 second, but unless an agent makes a change after the skills drop for the ticket to get assigned is the issue. 

We also tested with the only agent being assigned the skill and 2 other agents without the skill being online and the ticket sits until an agent makes a change. 

The goal would be when the ticket is created and it has a skill, if it checks and 0 agents online with the skill, the ticket would automatically assign to any agent. Then if the agent with the skill is online and is at capacity, the skills automatically drop and assigns to the next available agent without agent interactions required currently with skills being dropped. 

Another suggestion, when the skill drops, can there be an event in the event log, maybe when it drops the skill, the skill is completely removed from the ticket, or a tag goes into the tags field of something like "skills_dropped"

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Jahn

Zendesk LuminaryCommunity Moderator

Barry Neary Rob Stack -  just a feedback in relation to Messaging and Capacity Rules under Omni-channel routing. 

The "Turn on messaging activity routing" on our instance are disabled last time as we technically wants the active messaging only to be counted against the agents capacity but we had an influx of messaging ticket last night hence majority of those becomes inactive unassigned messaging and to our surprise this was bulk assigned to 2 of our agents working that night. They were assigned 100+ messaging tickets in total.

Hope you can check this behavior of Zendesk messaging please if this "Turn on messaging activity routing" is disable. 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Tim M

We are actively working on the limtation that agent needs to do something when skills timeout to get the ticket. This should be in place by end of Q2

 

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jahn

If you switch off the message activity routing setting then each message after 10 mins in queue will be set to inactive and will no longer take up capacity. Then when agents come online they can be assigned these inactive messages over their max capacity as the messages are not taking up capacity.

The trigger below will detect when the message goes from active to inactive and then the action could be to assign the message to an empty group, where agents can manually assign the inactive tickets to themselves via a view. In that way the messaging queue only contains active messages

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Are there any plans to allow a tailored skills timeout per Skill Type? 
For instance, we have a Language Skill Type and a Specialism Skill Type set up. The Specialism must be routed to a relevant agent, but the Language is more of a nice-to-have, so it would be ideal if we could set a Skills Timeout for our Language Skill Type without needing to also turn this on for the Specialism Skill type. 

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Hey Barry Neary any update on SMS getting added to OCR?

 

Thanks!

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi D.Fitz 

We dont plan to do that , but we do plan in Q3 to have different skills priority levels - so language skill could be added to a ticket and given an lower priority level than the specialism. When the skills timeout elapses and no agent with both the right language and specialism is available, the system will drop the language skill and just look for an agent with the correct specialism

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Bobby Koch

Zendesk Luminary

Are there any plans to have capacity rerouting? Suppse an agent has 3 active chats, 1 goes in active, then a new chat comes in. Then, the inactive chat is now active again for whatever reason and the agents capacity is 3. Is there a world where this can be reassigned to another available agent especially if the status is not open?

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Bobby Koch 

 

Currently we have the ability to automatically reassign tickets that reopen while the agent is a certain status e.g. offline.

What we dont have is the ability to take into account is the agent at max capacity or not, and only reassign if they are at max. This is on the long term roadmap

Barry

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Hi Barry Neary , I'm also curious about updates on the ability for SMS tickets to be assigned via Omnichannel routing. Is there an expected date for this? Thank you

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Danielle

 

Looking like early Q3

 

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HI Ahmed,

I have same trouble, we have trigger with Agent Direct Assignment on VIP contracts, OOO is ignoring these assignments, and ticket stay in queue forever. I´ll ~around Q3 try Skill Routing to achieve a better fulfill, but you are right OOO App was more convinient in regulate this compare to Omni Channel in Zendesk. I hope they fix the gaps in future.

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Ahmed Zaid and Tobias Hermanns I would recommend sharing this feedback in the following topic: Feedback - Ticketing system (Support)

 

Keeping track of feedback across all of our articles can get a bit messy and I want to make sure our PM's have visibility. Thank you!

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Ahmed Zaid 

When using the reassign reopened tickets feature, tickets will only be routed to available agents. Just to confirm: you dont want tickets to reassigned if there are no available agents?

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FEEDBACK: I was experiencing an issue where messaging tickets created outside of our business hours would flood the first agent to set themselves Online and capacity rules would be ignored by the system. After contacting support, it was suggested that I turn on Messaging Activity Routing which I did. Messaging Activity Routing eliminates that issue I was experiencing initially but creates another one: if all/most of the message tickets created outside of our business hours haven't been resolved yet, new LIVE messaging tickets cannot be assigned. Are there any workarounds? What I want to achieve is 1) First online agent does NOT get flood with ALL messaging tickets 2) LIVE messaging conversations are prioritized over any messaging tickets that were submitted outside of our business hours since those customers are no longer live. Messaging tickets submitted after hours should be treated/routed link email tickets.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

HI Rachel G. 

 

Are you using omnichannel routing queues?  If so one approach is to have two separate queues - one for active messaging tickets and one for inactive. 

The conditions on the active messages queue is simple, the ticket must be a message and it must have the ‘active’ tag. The inactive messages queue is similar, except that messaging tickets must have an inactive tag.

The active and inactive tags used by these queues are set using triggers. The active message queue can be assigned to a group that deals with live messages, while the inactive one could be assigned to an offline group that deals with email tickets. Alternatively, you could have both queues being worked by the same group, but as the active messages queue is higher priority, agents will be dealing with active messages first before being assigned any inactive ones.

 

Creating the triggers

First, you should create a trigger that adds an active tag to all new messages. 

 

Then create another trigger that is designed to fire when the active message becomes inactive after 10 minutes of no conversation in the message thread. The below trigger fires when this occurs and removes the active tag, replacing it with the inactive tag.

This trigger relies on the fact that when a messaging ticket transitions from being active to inactive, that counts as a ticket update and a chat transcript is added to the ticket.

 

There is no way currently to detect a message going from inactive to active using a trigger. The best you can do is to use another trigger which detects an update to an inactive message. Note that this update could be due to a change from inactive back to active, but it could also be due to any update to the ticket (e.g. tag being added to the ticket) and hence it's not recommended.

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Ahmed Zaid

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderCommunity Moderator

Hello Barry Neary ,

My agents alerted me to an issue where they come back from vacation and they have reopened tickets still assigned to them despite having Reassign reopened tickets
option turned on and them being on the correct OOO status.

To investigate, I did the following:

  • Double checked my routing configuration
  • Ran a report using Agent state daily dataset to ensure the agent had the correct status at the reopening time
  • Ran a report using Update history dataset to query tickets that changed status to Open while still being assigned to the same OOO agent

I attached screenshots for verification. Did I do anything wrong?

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Ahmed Zaid Does this tickets belong to Talk Channel? Voicemail, Inbound Phone … are not part of Omni Channel Routing and Re-Routing.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Ahmed Zaid 

 

Do you have idle timeout switched on? If so that will set your agents to offline when they are out of office.  Are you excluded from the disconnection service? If not, that will set your agents to offline.

 

Another thing to check is how long is your Zendesk session expiry set to? That will also set agents to offline when it expires

 

Barry

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Ahmed Zaid

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderCommunity Moderator

Tobias Hermanns ,

All tickets are email/web and were assigned using omnichannel routing. They were part of a Queue and I have the option to evaluate queue conditions again upon ticket re-opening enabling.

Barry Neary ,

I have idle timeout disabled and although the session duration is only 8 hours, the report shows that the unified status persisted all week

 

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Ahmed Zaid 

Did you may verify in Event Log of Ticket it´s not a manual assignment to OOO Agents from another Agent?

 

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Ahmed Zaid

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderCommunity Moderator

Hi Tobias Hermanns,

Yes I confirmed that all the tickets were already assigned to the agents in pending/on-hold/solved status before the agent went O.O.O. Then the tickets got reopened while the assignee was O.O.O for various reasons. Some due to triggers (based on reply to side conversation) and others due to reply from requester.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Ahmed Zaid : if you're still having issues, perhaps raise a ticket with our customer advocacy team?

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Ahmed Zaid

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderCommunity Moderator

Barry Neary ,

Austin from support helped me find the root cause. When I moved to queue based routing, I stopped adding a routing tag for email tickets because I found it redundant. That is what disabled Reopened ticket reassignments for email tickets. I appreciate everyone's help.

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I'm sure I'm missing something very basic but after flipping on Omnichannel routing for our Email tickets we're getting feedback that they're being assigned to agents in “Away” statuses. I'd expect email tickets to only assign to “Online” agents. Haven't found a setting for this except the “Reassign reopened tickets” which is a different issue entirely. What am I missing?

 

As an example we had an agent in an “Away” status for training but they were assigned 5 new tickets by Omnichannel when we flipped it on.

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Barry Neary

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Harrison Meesschaert 

Email tickets (which include those created from an email, web form or API) require that an agent be online or in away status to be routed to. This is different for messaging or voice tickets, which require an agent to be online. The thinking here is that as email tickets are typically not as time critical, an agent can be assigned an email ticket even if they are temporarily not at their desk.

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