My agent automatically gets assigned more tickets than their capacity allows

Issue symptoms

When my agent goes online, they automatically are assigned more tickets than their capacity allows. For instance, omnichannel routing is enabled on my account with capacity rules. My agent, with a capacity of 2 tickets, has been assigned 3 tickets. 

Resolution steps

Causes

By default, Zendesk doesn't count inactive messaging tickets toward the capacity limit and they are still assigned to available agents. When an end-user reply hasn't been received after ten minutes, messaging tickets become inactive and no longer count toward the limit.

This can also occur if the agent manually took tickets from a view or was directly assigned a ticket by an admin or other agent.

If you aren't using messaging activity routing to count inactive messaging tickets towards an agent's capacity, the following scenarios could result in an agent exceeding their capacity as well:

• The agent had inactive messaging tickets that became active again.
• All agents were unavailable for a period of time, such as non-business hours, but messaging tickets were still received during that time and became inactive. The first agent to become available again could be assigned all of those inactive tickets, and then those tickets could become active again.

Solutions

To ensure inactive conversations are counted towards your agent capacity, enable the Turn on messaging activity routing setting in your routing configuration. That way, inactive messaging conversations will be treated the same as active messaging conversations.

If Turn on messaging activity routing is off and you do not offer 24-hour support, your account can accumulate inactive messaging tickets, specifically if the Web Widget bot allows transfers to agents at any time. To avoid agents getting assigned many inactive messaging tickets at once, create a schedule and add the business hours condition step in your bot flow. This condition limits when messaging tickets are created based on your schedule.

Note: If you created custom omnichannel queues, you can create a dashboard that shows live data on how work is being routed.

For more information, see the article: Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads.