Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
March 11, 2024 | March 11, 2024 | March 25, 2024 |
Zendesk is pleased to announce the ability for admins to create additional queues for omnichannel routing.
This announcement includes the following topics:
- What is changing?
- Why is Zendesk making this change?
- What do I need to do?
- Frequently asked questions
What is changing?
Previously, tickets were required to be assigned to a group before they could be routed by omnichannel routing. Tickets could only be routed to an agent within their assigned group, which led to tickets waiting in the queue longer than necessary if no one in the group was available. This can harm your first reply time and diminish agent productivity.
With omnichannel routing queues, you can now group tickets by your specified criteria into queues and then route them to one or more groups at a time. Specifically, routing queues have:
- Conditions, similar to triggers and other business rules, that are checked each time a ticket is created or updated to determine the correct queue for the ticket to reside in.
- Primary groups that can be used to route tickets to multiple groups of agents at a time. All agents in the specified primary groups are treated as a single pool of agents eligible to receive the tickets.
- Secondary groups that are used as "overflow" or "fallback" groups of agents if none of the agents in the primary groups are available.
- Queue order that controls the order in which queues are checked against new and updated tickets. Similar to triggers and SLA policies, queues are evaluated in the order they are listed in Admin Center.
- Queue priority that determines which queue's work takes precedence if an agent or group of agents receives work from more than one queue.
For more information, see Understanding omnichannel routing queues and Creating additional omnichannel routing queues.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Using custom omnichannel routing queues solves some of the biggest feedback we've received about omnichannel routing: the need for built-in overflow to other groups of agents. Additionally, it provides more opportunities to optimize your workflow for first reply time, achieve your SLA objectives, and increase agent productivity.
What do I need to do?
No action is required. This feature is being rolled out automatically to all Professional and Enterprise accounts. You won't experience any changes to your omnichannel routing workflow unless you decide to create custom queues.
If you have questions or need assistance, contact Zendesk Customer Support. If you have product feedback or feature requests related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback.
Frequently asked questions
What happens after I create my first custom queue?
After you create your first queue, omnichannel routing ignores the group assigned to a ticket and instead uses the primary and secondary groups of the queue the ticket is in. The ticket’s group is only used to route tickets that don’t match any of the custom queues. Omnichannel routing assigns messaging tickets that don’t match any custom queues and don’t have an assigned group to the account’s default group; call tickets that don’t match any custom queues and don’t have an assigned group are routed to the group used when setting up the phone number; email tickets that don't match any custom queues can still be routed through the standard omnichannel routing queue as long as they have an assigned group and the auto-routing tag.
Only newly created and updated tickets are added to your queues. Existing tickets aren’t matched to queues.
How do triggers work with queues?
Any time a ticket is created or updated, triggers run and their actions are applied to the tickets. After the triggers have completed, omnichannel routing evaluates queues in the order and inserts the ticket into the first matching queue.
If a trigger assigns a group to a ticket, but the ticket is then inserted into a custom queue, the queue’s primary and secondary groups take precedence and the ticket’s assigned group is ignored.
When does omnichannel routing check queues?
Omnichannel routing checks a ticket’s queue assignment when the ticket is created and after any ticket updates until such time as the ticket is assigned to an agent and leaves the queue.
Can tickets re-enter a queue after being routed to an agent?
No. After a ticket is assigned to an agent from an omnichannel routing queue, it can’t re-enter a queue. If it is reassigned to another group or agent, that reassignment takes effect immediately without the ticket re-entering the queue.
How do skills work with queues?
Skills aren’t available as conditions for queues. However, if a ticket already has skills added to it, such as added by a trigger, omnichannel routing will consider the skills as well agent status and capacity when routing the ticket to an agent. If no agents in the queue’s primary groups with the skill are available, omnichannel routing will look at agents in the secondary groups. If an agent with the skill still isn’t available, omnichannel routing’s behavior is determined by the skills timeout setting. If you’re turned on the skills timeout option, omnichannel routing will start dropping skill requirements and searching for available agents with the remaining skills again. If you haven’t turned on skills timeout, the ticket remains in the queue until an agent in any of the primary or secondary groups with the skill becomes available.
How do I know which queue a ticket was added to?
Queue assignment is recorded in the ticket event log. See Viewing all events for ticket updates.