Announcing assignment and capacity management for messaging in omnichannel routing

Announced on	Rollout on
June 15, 2023	June 15, 2023

Zendesk is pleased to announce a new setting to help you manage omnichannel routing capacity rules for messaging tickets.

What's changing?

It's important to understand how agents accept new work and manage how their capacity is calculated. Currently, inactive messages (defined as no response in the last 10 minutes) are directly assigned to agents and aren't counted towards the agent's capacity. 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. When selected, omnichannel routing offers all messaging conversations, both active and inactive, to agents via the Accept button. Likewise, all messaging tickets with a status of Open are counted towards an agent's capacity, not just the active messages. A messaging ticket stops being counted towards an agent's capacity when the status is set to Pending, On-hold, or Solved.

When this option isn't turned on, the current behavior persists. That is, only active messaging tickets are offered to agents via the Accept button, inactive messages are automatically assigned, and inactive messages aren't counted towards an agent's capacity.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

This change gives admins more control over how agents accept messaging tickets and how agent capacity is calculated when using omnichannel routing. It makes the routing logic simpler and more transparent, which means users can feel more confident about their routing solution.

What do I need to do?

This new option is available to all accounts that have activated omnichannel routing and are using Messaging. For more information, see Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads.