Announcing omnichannel routing, agent status, and live reporting

Announced on	Rollout starts	Rollout ends
October 11, 2022	October 11, 2022	November 21, 2022

We are delighted to announce the General Availability release of omnichannel routing, new options for agent status, and the extending our omnichannel reporting capabilities and reach. This announcement answers the following questions:

• What is changing?
• Why is Zendesk making this change?
• What do I need to do?

What is changing?

This release includes the following new features:

• An omnichannel routing engine, which now includes the ability to route Talk calls as well as Support tickets and messages
• A unified agent status picker and custom agent statuses
• Extending our Live Agent Status Reporting with drill-in to now include agent’s maximum and available live capacity
• Explore Live Dashboard now being made available to our Professional customers

With omnichannel routing, Support tickets, messages, and voice calls can all be routed using the one routing engine. This routing engine automatically assigns work to agents based on their status and their current workload. It enables customers to decide the order in which work is assigned to agents by setting the priority of individual tickets, messages, and calls.

The unified agent status feature allows agents to easily select their status across all channels in one place. Administrators can also create custom statuses for their agents such as ‘At lunch’ or ‘In training’ which can be used for reporting and routing purposes.

Managers can now use our Live drill down in the Explore live dashboard to see not only what their agents are working on now but also what spare capacity they have. We have also extended our Live Dashboard Support to our Professional customers as a read only dashboard.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Customers can use these features to ensure that agents are working on the most important issues first, helping to maximize service levels across the CX operation. It also ensures that agents spend less time having to look for work -- instead, the routing engine will automatically assign them the most important task to accomplish next based on predefined priority rules. Managers will also have more information about agent workload, helping them to make decisions about where resources should be directed to ensure service levels are maintained.

What do I need to do?

To qualify for these these features, you will need to:

• Have Agent Workspace enabled
• If you use Chat, you must have native messaging or Sunshine Conversation enabled, and you must not be using live chat

Please refer to our documentation to understand these features and how best to configure and leverage them:

• About omnichannel routing with unified agent status
• Using omnichannel routing to route calls
• Balancing your agent workload with capacity rules
• Configuring omnichannel routing
• Configuring unified agent status
• Seeing live agent status and activities
• Announcing Explore live dashboard for Professional plans