Omnichannel routing assigns tickets from email (including web form, side conversations, and API), calls, and messaging directly to agents based on agent availability and capacity and, on Professional plans and above, ticket priority and skills. The standard omnichannel routing configuration directs all eligible tickets into a single queue, assigning work to agents in the group assigned to the ticket. If you want to use omnichannel routing to direct work to agents in multiple groups or configure secondary or fallback groups, you can create custom queues.
If you create custom queues, new tickets are inserted into the first custom queue they meet the conditions for, and omnichannel routing uses the standard queue only if the ticket doesn't match any custom queues. On Team and Growth plans, email and messaging tickets that are reassigned back to a group are automatically inserted into the standard queue and assigned to an agent in the ticket's group. On Professional plans and above, admins can choose whether to reassign email and messaging tickets through the custom queues or the standard queue.
You must have the Agent Workspace to use omnichannel routing.
Creating a custom omnichannel routing queue
Before creating queues, ensure you understand how queues work in omnichannel routing. You can create up to 199 custom queues in addition to the standard omnichannel routing queue.
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing >
Queues. - Click Create queue.
- Enter a Name for the queue.
- (Optional) Enter a Description for the queue.
- Click Add condition to set up the queue to meet All or
Any conditions.
Conditions are the qualifications needed for a ticket to be added to the queue.
- Select a Condition, Field operator, and Value for each condition you add.
- (Optional, Enterprise plans only) Select Distribute tickets across
subqueues if you want to route specific percentages of the tickets
meeting this queue's conditions to different primary and secondary groups.
You can create up to five subqueues per custom queue.
If you select this option, provide a Name and configure the Percentage, Priority, Primary groups, and Secondary groups (as described below) for each subqueue rather than the custom queue as a whole. The sum of the subqueue percentages must equal 100%.
After creating all of your subqueues, click Save.
- Specify the queue's Priority relative to other queues.
Valid values are 1-100, with 1 being the highest priority.
Queue priority is only considered when an agent receives work from multiple queues. In that case, work from the queue with the higher priority is assigned first.
- Select at least one Primary group.
You can select up to 20 primary groups. Omnichannel routing treats all primary groups as a single pool of agents.
- (Optional) If you want to configure secondary groups for the queue, select
Turn on secondary groups and then select at least one
Secondary group.
You can select up to 20 secondary groups. Omnichannel routing treats all secondary groups as a single pool of agents.
Omnichannel routes work to the primary groups first, falling back to the secondary groups only if no agents in the primary groups are available. If no agents are available in any of the primary or secondary groups, the tickets remain in the queue until an agent from any of the groups becomes available.
- Click Save.Note: New queues are automatically added to the bottom of the list on the Queues page. If you want your newly created queue to be evaluated prior to other omnichannel routing queues, you must reorder the list. See Managing custom omnichannel routing queues.
After you create custom queues, you can report on their performance to see how well work is being routed through them, including how much work is awaiting available agents and how long work items spend in each queue on average. See Explore recipe: Reporting on custom omnichannel queue performance.
Building queue condition statements
Condition statements consist of a condition, operator, and value. Conditions are the qualifications needed for a ticket to enter the queue. The field operator determines the relationship between the condition and the value. For example, if you select the field operator "Is," your condition must equal the specified value. Supported field operators differ by condition.
-
Routing channel: Indicates how omnichannel routing is treating a
ticket for routing purposes. Often this aligns with the ticket's channel
(also known as the via type). However, some settings, such as treating agent-ended messaging sessions
as email tickets, can result in this value being different from
the ticket's channel. For example, you can use the following conditions to create a queue that routes agent-ended messaging session tickets only:
- Channel | Is | Messaging
- Routing channel | Is | Email
-
All ticket trigger
conditionsNote: The Ticket > Channel condition returns a complete list of ticket channels, including those that aren't supported by omnichannel routing. See Channels supported by omnichannel routing.