About unified agent status

Fastpath: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Omnichannel routing > Agent statuses

Unified agent status is part of omnichannel routing and provides a way for agents to control availability for Support, Talk, and Messaging from a single menu. In addition to the default unified statuses available on all plans, admins on Professional and Enterprise plans can also define custom unified statuses to suit their workflows.

Unified agent statuses are automatically available to accounts that meet the requirements.

This article contains the following topics:

• About the default unified agent statuses
• Requirements and limitations of unified agent status
• Related articles

About the default unified agent statuses

Unified agent statuses are used to inform omnichannel routing behavior for tickets from Support, Messaging, and Talk. Agents set their unified status manually and need to adjust it throughout the day to accurately reflect their availability to receive work.

There are four default agent statuses:

• Online - Tickets from Talk, Messaging, and Support can be routed to the agent.
• Away - Only Support tickets can be routed to the agent.
• Transfer only - Only tickets that have already been reviewed and need to be transferred to the agent can be routed to them.
• Offline - No tickets can be routed to the agent.

Modifying an agent's status

In most situations, an agent's status is set manually by the agents themselves. They are encouraged to change their status to offline before any breaks. However, an agent's status is automatically set to offline or away, as defined by an admin, when one of the following events is detected:

• An agent closes the Agent Workspace without signing out (by shutting down their computer, closing their browser window, or putting their computer in sleep mode)
• An agent’s connection is lost due to a network outage
• An agent is idle for longer than the idle status threshold defined by admins

Requirements and limitations of unified agent status

Consider the following requirements and limitations before enabling and using omnichannel routing and unified agent status.

Requirements

Your account must meet the following requirements to use unified agent status and omnichannel routing:

• The Agent Workspace must be activated for your account.
• If your account has a Chat subscription, native messaging or Sunshine Conversations must also be activated.
• You can't be using live chat.

Limitations

The following limitations currently exist for unified agent status in omnichannel routing:

• Operating hours won't set an agent's status.
• After you turn on omnichannel routing, you can no longer set a Talk agent status from the Talk dashboard, mobile apps, or Talk APIs. Integrations that use Talk APIs to change agent statuses might also be impacted.
• Explore dashboards will show per channel agent statuses but not unified custom statuses yet. This will be supported in later releases.
• If call forwarding is enabled and the status of an agent is automatically set to offline because the agent has been disconnected, calls to the agent will no longer be forwarded to the agent's phone.
• When omnichannel routing is enabled, unified agent statuses can be in an inconsistent state. It is important to manually set every agent's unified status to offline initially, then allow them to set their own status after that. If you're an admin for a particularly large organizations and require assistance with this, contact Zendesk Customer Support.
• Based on your plan, there are limits to the number of custom agent statuses you can create:
  • Team and Growth: You cannot create custom statuses
  • Professional: 5 custom statuses
  • Enterprise: 100 custom statuses

Related articles

See the following articles for more information to help you get up and running with unified agent statuses:

• Creating custom unified agent statuses
• Managing unified agent statuses
• About omnichannel routing with unified agent status