Omnichannel routing with unified agent status allows tickets to be directed to team members based on their availability and capacity. Agents can set their status for multiple channels at once. On Professional and Enterprise plans, admins can define custom statuses (such as In a meeting) and configure priority-based routing as well.
This page lists resources for understanding, configuring, and using omnichannel routing to meet your workflow goals. The following resources are available:
Overview
- About omnichannel routing with unified agent status
- Best practices: Planning your routing workflow
- About unified agent status
- About using skills to route tickets
- Routing options for incoming tickets
Configuration
- Turning on omnichannel routing
- Managing your omnichannel routing configuration
- Understanding omnichannel routing queues
- Creating additional omnichannel routing queues
- Managing omnichannel routing queues
- Configuring unified agent status
- Balancing your agent workload with capacity rules
- Using round robin routing for email, messaging conversations, and call tickets
Usage
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Setting your agent status with omnichannel routing
- Workflow: Using omnichannel routing to manage calls
- Workflow recipe: Automatically closing tickets created by abandoned calls
- Workflow: Using skills to route calls to specific agents
- Workflow: Using skills in omnichannel routing to overflow calls to other agents
- Workflow: Using queues in omnichannel routing to overflow calls to other groups
- Workflow: Using omnichannel routing queues to handle active and inactive messages differently
- Best practices: Using omnichannel routing to achieve first reply time SLAs
- Omnichannel routing ticket queuing and assignment scenarios
- Omnichannel routing isn't routing some of my tickets upon creation
Reporting
- Overview of the omnichannel agent state dashboard
- Analyzing agent state
- Metrics and attributes for agent state
- Seeing live agent status and activities
6 comments
Katie Holt
Hi all! I'm testing Omnichannel in one of my sandboxes and there's an issue. If I have two agents with the same skill and capacity limits (for example: 3 emails), the system assigns tickets 1, 2, and 3 to Agent 1 and then assigns tickets 4, 5, and 6 to Agent 2. How can I set up Omnichannel to route in a round-robin style instead? So Agent 1 would get the 1, 3, and 5 and Agent 2 would get 2, 4, and 6?
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Barry Neary
Hi Katie Holt
The above description (Agent 1 would get the 1, 3, and 5 and Agent 2 would get 2, 4, and 6) is how routing should work. The routing engine picks the agent that has the highest spare capacity first, and if two or more agents have the same highest spare capacity then it uses round robin,
So assuming agents 1 and 2 have no tickets assigned to them, one agent gets the first ticket, then for the second ticket the other agent would receive it as they have higher spare capacity and back and forward until agents hit their mex.
Can you create a ticket with our customer supp if this is not happening?
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Katie Holt
Hi Barry Neary that's not what happened. It filled up the queue for Agent 1 all the way to the capacity limit and then moved on to Agent 2. I have ticket #12856820 created. Feel free to review - thanks!
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Evan Woodbury
Loving the Omnichannel + Skills Routing Features
Nice job, Zendesk team! We're currently using Omnichannel Routing for email and web form tickets, as we don’t yet utilize talk or messaging tickets.
Some feedback based on our experience:
Skills Timeout Not Available in Business Hours
The skill priority and timeout feature is really cool, but we’re unable to fully leverage it since the “Timeout” setting only works in calendar hours. This limitation forced us to create additional complexity using automations, triggers, and primary/secondary skills groups to replicate a workflow where skills are dropped if no matching agent is found within a specified number of business hours.
Would Appreciate a Warning in Omnichannel Routing Settings
When enabling both the “Turn on reassignment for reopened tickets” and the “Reassign tickets through queues” features, we discovered that the reassignment functionality applied to all email tickets, even those without the Omnichannel routing tag. This was noted in one of the help guides but was easy to miss, and it caused a significant issue during rollout. A warning message within the settings UI would have been very helpful to catch this before deployment.
Integrating OOO App Features with Agent Status
It would be great if the OOO app features were integrated directly into the “Agent Status” functionality. Managing statuses in two separate places creates a strange and inefficient workflow for both agents and admins.
Thanks to the Zendesk team for your ongoing improvements to Omnichannel Routing!
Evan Woodbury
Senior Process Engineer, Direct Supply
Milwaukee, WI
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Barry Neary
Thanks for the great feedback Evan Woodbury !
We take all of your points onboard and will try to get them added to the roadmap.
On the last point, we do have planned to add one of the key OOO app features in H1 2025 - being able to automatically reassign all open tickets when the agent goes offline. Are there any other features of OOO that you would like us to replicate?
Barry
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Evan Woodbury
Thanks Barry Neary. Other features of the OOO app that we'd like to see replicated include the ability to set group restrictions on the feature to limit impact and accidental misuse. We'd also like the ability for non-admins to update their own OOO status. We'd also like to ensure that non-adminds can change their own OOO status so tickets can be unassigned - right now only admins can do that.
If you're considering adding the ability for open tickets to reassign when an agent goes offline, our team would require this to be toggled to only when they are actually OOO, rather than just offline for the night. In current state we love that tickets will stay in the Partners name if they are offline and only reassign if they set their status to OOO. Happy to discuss our use case more if needed.
FYI, it was noted previously that if we turn off the brownser monitoring feature and close our browser, or status would remain until our security settings (Team member session expiration) automatically logged us out. We utilize SSO. We noticed our agent statues did not change to offline when a Partner was offline for 18+ hours, which is greater than what we have our Team member session expiration security settings at. This made it look like if someone set their status online, they would stay online forever. I plan to open a support ticket to look into this.
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