Omnichannel routing assigns tickets fromemail (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 alleligible ticketsinto 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.

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All Suites Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus
Support Professional or Enterprise
Location: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Omnichannel routing > Queues

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.

This article contains the following topics:
  • Creating a custom omnichannel routing queue
  • Building queue condition statements
  • Adding subqueues
  • Using subqueues to evaluate predictive 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.

To create a custom omnichannel routing queue
  1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Queues.
  2. Click Create queue.
  3. Enter a Name for the queue.
  4. (Optional) Enter a Description for the queue.
  5. 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.

  6. Select a Condition, Field operator, and Value for each condition you add.

    See Building queue condition statements.

  7. (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.

    See Adding subqueues.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. (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.

  11. 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.

The following conditions are available for custom omnichannel routing queues:
  • 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 conditions
    Note: 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.

Adding subqueues

On Enterprise plans, subqueues allow you to route specific percentages of the tickets meeting a queue's conditions to different primary and secondary groups. When adding subqueues, you must add at least two and up to 5 subqueues per queue.

To add subqueues
  1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Queues.
  2. Next to the queue you want to add subqueues to, click the options menu () and select Edit.
  3. Select Distribute tickets across subqueues.
  4. For each subqueue, enter the following:
    • Name: Subqueue names must be unique within the queue.
    • Percentage: The percentage of the queue's work that should be assigned through this subqueue.

      The sum of the subqueue percentage values must equal 100.

    • Priority: The subqueue's priority.
    • Primary groups and Secondary groups: The groups to which the tickets in the queue should be assigned.
    • (Optional) Set Predictive routing to Active to use AI to assign the subqueue's tickets to agents.
  5. Click Save.

Using subqueues to evaluate predictive routing

If you want to evaluate how predictive routing works for a queue, you have two options:
  • A/B testing: (Recommended) Splits a queue into two subqueues that run in parallel. This method controls for other changes happening at the same time, and the test runs until both subqueues have sufficient data to evaluate the performance of predictive routing.
  • Before/after testing: Turns on predictive routing for 100% of a queue's tickets, which can then be compared to the queue's performance before predictive routing was turned on. This method is less reliable than A/B testing because it doesn't account for other variables that could change between the two time periods being compared, such as fluctuations in ticket volume, seasonality, and releases.

After the testing period, you can filter the ticket progress real-time dashboard by time to compare results from before and after you turned on predictive routing. Look at the agent engagement time metric. Additionally, you might also see improvements in the customer wait time and average resolution time metrics. Lower values for any of these metrics would indicate that predictive routing provided improvements.

The following procedure describes how to use subqueues to perform A/B testing. To do this, you'll create two subqueues with the same priorities, primary groups, and secondary groups. Then, for one of the subqueues you'll turn on predictive routing and for the other you'll leave it off.

To configure subqueues to evaluate predictive routing
  1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Queues.
  2. Next to the queue you want to add subqueues to, click the options menu () and select Edit.
  3. Select Distribute tickets across subqueues.
  4. For the first subqueue, enter the following:
    • Name: A unique name.
    • Percentage: Enter 50 or a different percentage you'd like to apply predictive routing to.
    • Priority: The subqueue's priority.
    • Primary groups and Secondary groups: The groups to which the tickets in the queue should be assigned.
    • Set Predictive routing to Active.
  5. For the second subqueue, enter the following:
    • Name: A unique name.
    • Percentage: Enter 50 or the remaining percentage of the queue's work that isn't using predictive routing.
      Note: The subque percentage values must total 100%.
    • Priority: Enter the same priority as the first subqueue.
    • Primary groups and Secondary groups: Select the same primary and secondary groups as the first subqueue.
    • Leave Predictive routing to Inactive.
  6. Click Save.

Planning your evaluation period

After configuring your test for predictive routing, you must determine how long to run the test before evaluating the performance. It's important to remember that big improvements might stand out quickly, but smaller margins of improvement might take longer to become evident.

Use the following table as a guideline for how long you need to run the test to reliably have sufficient data to determine whether predictive routing improves your ticket-time metrics for different queue ticket volumes. Improvements will be visible as reductions in your ticket-time metrics.
Metric Improvement Scenario Days to Observe

(by daily ticket volume in the smallest subqueue)
  50/day 100/day 200/day
5% 48 days 24 days 12 days
10% 12 days 6 days 3 days
15% 6 days 3 days 2 days
20% 3 days 2 days 1 day
25% 2 days 1 day 1 day
Note: The estimates provided in the table are not guarantees. They assume steady traffic over the test period. The actual duration depends on how noisy your metrics are. Volatile metrics can take noticeably longer than shown, while very stable ones may resolve sooner. Treat these estimates as a starting point.
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