| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| July 24, 2023 | July 24, 2023 | July 28, 2023 |
Zendesk is pleased to announce an enhancement to omnichannel routing, which enables admins to configure whether and how they'd like to reassign tickets that are reopened while agents are in particular statuses.
What is changing?
When using omnichannel routing, you now have the option to automatically reassign email and messaging tickets that move from the Solved, Pending, or On-hold statuses (or ticket status categories, if using custom ticket statuses) back to Open when the assigned agent has a particular status, as defined by an admin. When enabled, tickets are always reassigned to another agent within the same group.
Within the omnichannel routing configuration, admins have the option to turn on reassignment for reopened tickets, select the channels for which they want to use automatic ticket reassignment, and specify one or more agent statuses that should result in reopened tickets being reassigned.
Previously, reopened tickets would remain assigned to the original agent, regardless of that agent's status unless it was manually reassigned.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
If an agent is no longer available to handle a ticket when it reopens, it could result in a poor customer service experience. Giving admins the ability to turn on this feature per-channel and for specific agent statuses provides more control over their end user experience and enables admins to balance the need for prompt responses with the value of keeping the ticket with the agent who has the most context and knowledge of the ticket.
What do I need to do?
This feature is being rolled out automatically to all customers on Professional plans and above who have turned on omnichannel routing. If you want to start reassigning reopened tickets, update your omnichannel routing configuration.
Frequently asked questions
Does this feature reassign all tickets?
No. Only tickets that change from a status (or custom status within a status category of) Solved, Pending, or On-hold back to Open are reassigned and the assigned agent has one of the agent statuses specified by an admin in the routing configuration.
Does this feature reassign tickets that weren't assigned via omnichannel routing originally?
Yes, though the behavior varies slightly between email tickets and messaging conversations. Email tickets that were assigned manually and don't contain the auto-routing tag are reassigned back to the group the assigned agent is in, not to specific agents within the group. Regardless of how they were assigned originally, email tickets with the auto-routing tag and messaging conversations are assigned directly to another agent within the original agent's group.
18 Comments
Hi!
What happens, if an Agent is on such "Status" and another Agent re-assign this ticket to this Agent, which will show "Offline" in the Assignee list? Does it block the assignment? Does it repeat the re-assignment?
Thanks.
Tobi
Hi,
feature tested, it isn´t not (complete) working.
1.) The ticket which changed Status and set Assignee to "-" and keep Group level is not putting this ticket back to Omni Engine to re-assign it to another free capacity Agent.
2.) Channel "Phone Call" seems not supported.
Thanks.
Tobi
Hi
Can we use this for a specific group? or will this apply to all?
Thanks
Vicki
Hi,
adding 2 Bugs:
a) If you disable the feature and delete a status, once you enable this feature again, the Status is "empty" in the Web GUI config and not deleted.
b) If you set this status, once Agent close the browser, (5 min late) it changed Agent to Offline and re-assignment isn´t working again.
What are plans to re-assign currently open tickets when an agent goes offline in the first place? This feature only seems to cover tickets that aren't open when the agent goes offline.
Hi Barry Neary
We would to have this in our instance.
Can you help?
Regards,
Hi Tobias
For the reassignement to occur, the actual ticket status must change from Pending, On Hold or Solved back to Open and the agent that the ticket is assigned to must be in one of the status you have selected.
For a support ticket to be reassigned, it must have the auto routing tag associated with it
Tickets created on the back of a phone call are not in scope for this feature, as unlike with support and messaging, an end user cannot reopen a talk ticket by calling in again - that would be treated as a new ticket
Barry
Barry
Hi Vicki Horne
This feature applies to all groups
Barry
Hi Ola Timpson
This feature does not automatically reassign all tickets when agent goes offline. One of the reasons why we did not include that capability is that if there is a temporary internet outage or the agent accidently closed their browser, they would be set offline and if this feature could mean that all of their tickets would be reassigned.
Do you think some kind of timer delay would address this issue?
Barry
Hi Tobias Hermanns
a) If you disable the feature and delete a status, once you enable this feature again, the Status is "empty" in the Web GUI config and not deleted.
This is a known issue and will be addressed
b) If you set this status, once Agent close the browser, (5 min late) it changed Agent to Offline and re-assignment isn´t working again.
This is due to a disconnection service that automatically sets an agent to offline if they close the browser. This was introduced as customers were complaining that unless the agent remembered to log off the system before closing down their browser, they were being left in online status. It is possible to suspend this disconnection service for particular customers, if that is required
Hi GUSTAVO FREIRE LOPES
The rollout should be completed by end of business today - if by then you still dont have access to this feature , let me know and I will follow up
Barry
Hi Barry Neary
It´s simply not working, also not for E-Mail or Web-Form tickets, it doesn´t matter if I changed the Assignee to a Group or this feature unassigns the Assignee, in both cases, the Webform / E-Mail Channel ticket, which includes the tag from Ticket Creation trigger is NOT reassigned to an Agent belong to this group. It only removes the Assignee and ticket stay in the group. I expect that the Omni process run again and re-assign the ticket based on capacity like ticket creation does.
Can you confirm this is a bug then, and what bug fix time?
-------------------
Regarding:
Hi Ola Timpson
This feature does not automatically reassign all tickets when agent goes offline. One of the reasons why we did not include that capability is that if there is a temporary internet outage or the agent accidently closed their browser, they would be set offline and if this feature could mean that all of their tickets would be reassigned.
Do you think some kind of timer delay would address this issue?
I have the same issue too, and I think it ONLY need to be trigger once if select such custome Status. i.e. Assignee go to Vacation and select the "monitored" Vacation status, then all "Open Tickets" should be once re-assign to the group > and re-trigger to omni engine.
Right now only the tickets which changed after the status selection go into the unassign trigger.
Thanks. Tobias
Hi Barry Neary
Definitely understand that reasoning - perhaps as Tobias suggested we could designate an 'off-shift' status that causes tickets to be reassigned? But a timer delay would be helpful too - if an agent's internet went down for several hours (we have a lot of home workers, it happens!) then we'd want others to be able to work the tickets.
Thanks for the quick reply! I'm setting everything up in our sandbox at the moment, so the responsiveness is really helpful.
The primary benefit of this feature, in my mind, was for when agents are on vacation/leave for an extended period of time. From how this is described, it sounds like the feature can only work when the agent in question is logged in and actively using Zendesk, otherwise features like idle timeout or the disconnection service referenced will change the status to offline, thus negating the feature.
Having the option to set statuses that are not impacted by idle timeout or the disconnection service would make this a useful feature for our use case.
Hi Josh Paulsen
THere is the option to be excluded from the disconnection service - this would mean that if an agent set themselves to 'On Vacation' then they would stay in that status until they returned.
Of course this also means that if agent dont sign out or set themselves offline at end of shift, they could remain online and be routed work.
We are looking at changing the disconnection service so it can recognize if an agent is in a custom status like On Vacation that effectively means they are offline for each of the channels
Hi Barry Neary
Do you have an idea of a timeline on when Zendesk would support custom agent statuses that don't time out?
It's hard to believe that Zendesk currently don't offer a proper agent time-off management and we, customers, have to rely on a (deprecated?) and rather limited Out of Office application.
Thank you!
HI Joey
Just to confirm, you dont want a custom status to change even if the agent closes their browser? If so we can accomplish this with the above mentioned exclusion list
Barry
Hi Barry Neary
We'd love to be able to create a custom status, such as 'On Vacation' that would not turn to 'Offline' automatically after a certain time or if the browser is closed.
We are currently struggling with re-distributing the tickets from agents that are off for several days, so the ability to reassign reopened tickets with omnichannel routing is a very good step forward, but we need to ensure that agents remain with status 'On vacation' during the whole vacation period.
On the other side, we still want to ensure that an agent that forgets to move away from the 'Online' status, is automatically turned 'Offline'.
Hope it makes more sense!
Thanks,
Joey
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