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.
For more information, see the article: Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads.
20 comments
Kat
So If the support is available from 7am till 7.30pm and we have a business schedule set for that, but the agents are still getting massive numbers of "inactive tickets" assigned to them - what's the best way of limiting the number of these queries being assigned to agents?
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Cheeny Aban
I can see that a colleague is already helping you with regard to your inquiry about ticket routing. Rest assured that we'll do our best to help troubleshoot this issue!
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Stephen Braverman
Is there anything that can be done to either make these "inactive" messaging tickets count toward the capacity or remove the inactive timer of 10 minutes so they remain as "active" and thus counted towards the capacity?
2
Cody
Agreed with Stephen, is there a way to build a trigger or workflow that would make inactive tickets "active" so they respect the capacity rules. I would not prefer to have an agent reassign 90 "inactive" messaging tickets when they start their day.
3
Joyce
We are pleased to announce that the new setting to help you manage omnichannel routing capacity rules for messaging tickets has been implemented across all accounts.
Now, you can use the new routing configuration option, Turn on messaging activity routing, to treat inactive messaging conversations the same as active messaging conversations. This will now prevent any inactive messaging conversation from automatically getting assigned to the first agent to log in. When selected, omnichannel routing offers all messaging conversations, both active and inactive, to agents via the Accept button. This setting is located in the Admin Center > Omnichannel Routing > Routing Configuration.
You can visit this article for more information on the Announcement of assignment and capacity management for messaging in omnichannel routing.
Hope this helps!
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Stephen Braverman
Thanks @... ! This is great news!
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Michael Jagt
This feature flag is bugged - has no effect.
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Michael Jagt
Currently experiencing a huge problem with Zendesk and I hope someone here can help us.
I have enabled automatic routing of tickets with a capacity of 1 email, 1 messaging and 1 phone. But if you have a scearnio where one Group only has 1 agent in it who's on Available status (the rest being offline), then that agent gets all the cases in that queue assigned to their personal inbox.
So for instance one of my agents just got 40 tickets all at once...Their support is useless and says to do something I already have done, which is enable this feature, but no matter if it's enabled or disabled it's not working.
What are you guys doing in your Zendesk setup to assure automatic assigning of cases and capacity rules are actually followed by the system?
Thanks in advance!
2
Michael Jagt
@... can you check the above. Your support team offers 0 help here and don't know why or care to escalate or reply to messages.
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Kat
I have the same issue as Michael Jagt - the support ticket I had opened ages ago was unhelpful and got resolved by Zendesk Support without providing a resolution.
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Michael Jagt
Zendesk support is by far the most abysmal support I have ever seen 😅 @... can you please help us here..?
-1
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Michael Jagt,
I'm sorry if you feel your concern is not being addressed. I was about to create a ticket on your behalf so we can investigate this issue together but I see you already raised this issue with our Advocacy team and are currently being handled by a higher-tier Engineer. I'll monitor the ticket for you and step in if needed.
Again, our apologies for the inconvenience. I have full confidence our advocate will be able to sort this out for you. Thank you for your patience!
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Michael Jagt
Haha Hiedi Kysther, they just replied back to me with the exact same reply as the 5 other support agents. Telling me to enable Messaging routing which I have already enabled. They even confirmed in the reply that I have it enabled and have had it enabled for 4 days and now ask me if it's still an issue in the past 4 days. I'm out of words. Can you arrange a video call with me and someone responsible in your support team, Hiedi? This is unacceptable to be quite frank.
Please book mj@monta.com
2
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Michael Jagt,
The advocate that is assisting you on this issue would be glad to meet with you via Zoom. He just ask for your information so they can arrange it on their end. I'll continue to monitor the issue, if there's anything else you'll need, let us know. We're here to help!
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Meg Smith
Hi there, Hiedi Kysther! I'm having the same issue as Michael Jagt and it's making for an extremely poor experience for my agents and managers. As each agent signs on, they have to constantly reassign tickets to the main group until it somewhat evens out.
Capacity rules aside, is it possible to have messages re-distributed/reassigned automatically as agents sign on? Any help is greatly appreciated - thanks!
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Hiedi Kysther
Hi Meg Smith,
Since this requires a thorough investigation, I will create a ticket on your behalf. One of our advocates will reach out to help you with this issue. Thank you!
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Hayley Johnson
Its interesting reading this thread as i have had to turn omnichannel off completely as it just does not work with the messenger channel. I cannot find a way for tickets to not automatically assign to agents that are online in the group the ticket is associated with. We have tickets in our messenger channel that we dont want to behave as a live chat. We tried to be clever and move them into a holding group so that they dont ping as a live chat, but as soon as they move into a group that has agents assigned to it, the tickets just get assigned to agents within the group and overload their capacity and also over rule any other open tickets that should have a higher priority. We want to get to a point where our chat bot is triaging all messages and deciding which are live chat and which are a longer SLA but this is proving very difficult!
1
Permanently deleted user
Hi, I didn't use omnichannel routing.
But i got the same issue, how can i “Turn on messaging activity routing” if this setting is on omnichannel routing?
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Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi @...
Unfortunately you won't be able to turn on the Messaging Activity Routing without enabling Omnichannel Routing. It's a function only for Omnichannel Routing.
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Leslie
We are experiencing this right now. Agents are receiving tickets more than their allowed capacity. Messaging activity routing is on. Our support team is available 24/7. But still, inactive tickets are getting assigned to agents even at max capacity.
0