Phase | Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends | Status |
Phase 1 | June 19, 2023 | September 2023 | December 2023 | Complete |
Phase 2 | January 13, 2024 | April 2024 | May 2024 | Completed |
Phase 3 | August 5, 2024 | October 2024 | October 2024 | Completed |
What is changing?
Zendesk is automatically turning on omnichannel routing for eligible accounts. Using omnichannel routing to route tickets directly to agents can improve service levels, and more accurate reporting on agent statuses can help inform agent training and resource planning.
When omnichannel routing is activated, agents will be notified that omnichannel routing has been turned on and asked to update their status.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
As the volume of customer requests increase, customer support operations are expected to continuously improve on service levels and maximize agent productivity. Omnichannel routing is designed to address this. Specifically, omnichannel routing can help with:
- Improving key service level metrics, such as first response time, by assigning work directly to agents. Eliminating the need for agents to search through views to find tickets to work on saves time and effort.
- Increasing agent productivity by assigning work directly to the agent with the right availability, capacity, and skill set.
- Improving future resource planning, agent training, and performance assessments by analyzing what agents actually spend their time doing.
What do I need to do?
To use omnichannel routing after it's automatically activated
If your account is eligible and you intend to use omnichannel routing, follow the steps in Activating and configuring omnichannel routing to finish setting up the feature and start using it.
If you plan to report on your agent's status, instruct agents to start setting their unified agent status as soon as omnichannel routing is turned on. After they begin using unified agent statuses, admins can view the live agent status information on the Explore real-time dashboard, the Omnichannel agent state and activity dashboard (EAP), or see a history of your agents' status using the Explore historical agent status report.
To not use omnichannel routing after it's automatically activated
No action is required. Your existing views, triggers, and other workflows will continue to work exactly the same way. The only difference will be possible inaccuracy in the agent status data displayed in the Explore agent status reports. If you don't want to report on your agents' status, agents can ignore the status picker. If you want to turn off unified agent statuses, too, turn off omnichannel routing in Admin Center.
To ask questions or get help
If you have questions, product feedback, or feature requests based on this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback.
Other frequently asked questions
How do I use omnichannel routing?
To understand how omnichannel routing works, see About omnichannel routing.
Because omnichannel routing has already been turned on for your account, you can start using omnichannel routing as soon as you create a routing tag and a routing trigger to apply the routing tag to tickets. You can use the initial routing configuration as-is or you can modify it to better meet your needs. For details, see Activating and using omnichannel routing.
How can I report on my agent status?
Explore has an omnichannel dataset that includes agent status and activity information. This dataset can be used to create reports and dashboards. Additionally, after agents begin using unified agent statuses, you can view the live agent status information on the Explore real-time dashboard, the Omnichannel agent state and activity dashboard (EAP), or see a history of your agents' status using the Explore historical agent status report.
Can I turn omnichannel routing off?
Yes. Omnichannel routing can be turned off at any time. See Turning off omnichannel routing.
10 comments
Tim Grimshaw
Hi Team,
We switched on omni-channel routing when we migrated to Agent Workspace and messaging earlier this year. We had big problems with it, because it was auto-assigning messaging tickets immediately and forcefully (without the auto-routing tag), and after chatting with our Zendesk reps, they agreed that with our workflow we'd need to switch off the feature.
Is this article saying that at some point it's going to be randomly switched on again?
If so, how can we mark our account as 'no, don't automatically switch that on' pls?
I understand from this article that we can switch it off again, but that needs an admin to be online and aware that it's happened, at the time that it gets switched on automatically :(
Also in this article, it mentions the routing tag - but the biggest issue we had was that after chatting with Zendesk support, they confirmed that routing automatically applies to messaging tickets without the tag applied (we didn't want it to apply, so we didn't add the tags to tickets through a trigger - but it still auto-routed those tickets, which we didn't want). So we don't want this feature (omnichannel routing) enabled on our account please.
Thanks!
2
Jacquelyn Brewer
Tim Grimshaw I understand your concern. Please see the note at the top of this announcement. All accounts to which this applies will be notified ahead of time with additional information. I believe the only accounts affected by this are those that exclusively use what is referred to as the "email" channel in omnichannel routing, since those are the only tickets that use the routing tag. Since you use Messaging, you should be unaffected.
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Tim Grimshaw
Ah awesome - thank you Jacquelyn Brewer :)
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Molly Katolas
I was notified our account would be activated for Omnichannel routing but this article makes it sound like I have the option to simply go in and turn it off afterwards. I'm a little confused about the message here - what's the point of Zendesk forcing it live on some unknown date just for me to go in and turn it off again until our team is ready (and willing) to make the change? I'm not against using it but I'd like to turn it on at a time that's decided by my team, not an arbitrary date set by Zendesk.
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Barry Neary
Hi Molly
We can add you to an exclusion list if you dont want to use omnichannel routing - this means it wont be switched on automatically.
Apologies if this has caused you inconvenience, its just we are adding features to routing regularly and we wanted customers who may not be aware of routing have access to these features.
Let me know if I should go ahead and add you to that exclusion list. The planned date for activation is on or around Sept 25th (will confirm that date in next week or so)
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Hayley Johnson
Tim Grimshaw We had the same trouble. I loved using Omnichannel when we first launched - it made such a positive impact on our delivery of service to customers. But we then implemented the chatbot on our help center and switched off the contact us form and email channel, meaning all tickets were coming in via the messenger channel. We had some tagged to behave like a 'live' conversation and some tagged to behave like a ticket with a longer SLA. However, omnichannel just could not cope with 100% of tickets coming in via messenger. Capacity restrictions did not work and tickets were auto assigned to agents as soon as the ticket was added to a group that had agents assigned to it. No matter how creative we were with work arounds, we could not get the messenger tickets to assign using the omichannel rules so we have switched off omnichannel which was a very sad day for us.
Barry Neary Please can you ensure that we are added to the exclusion list to switch off omnichannel routing, Thanks :-)
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Barry Neary
Hi All,
Clearly the ideal would be that you the customer can choose which chats should be treated like messages (i.e. accept button flashes for agent and once assigned it takes up message capacity) and which should be treated like email tickets (i.e. they are assigned directly to agents and they take up support capacity ). This is not available now but is something we can look at doing or perhaps finding a workaround.
cc: Prakruti Hindia
Barry
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Molly Katolas
Thanks Barry Neary - please exclude our accounts.
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Sydney Neubauer
Please exclude our accounts as well - we do not want anything enabled automatically without proper vetting
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Barry Neary
Will do Molly Katolas and Sydney Neubauer
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