Using department spaces with omnichannel routing

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While both omnichannel routing and department spaces (also known as restricting agent ticket access by brand) can significantly improve how your team manages tickets, it’s important to understand that special configuration is required when using them together to prevent potential routing issues.

This article provides the required configuration for using these features together.

This article includes the following topics:

• Ensuring the department spaces and omnichannel routing features work together
• Mitigating routing issues when using both features

Ensuring the department spaces and omnichannel routing features work together

Department spaces allows companies to restrict agent access to tickets by specific brands. Agents aren’t supposed to be able to view or be assigned tickets associated with a brand they don’t belong to.

However, omnichannel routing doesn’t recognize which brands agents belong to and tickets are associated with. As a result, it may attempt to assign tickets to agents who don’t have the necessary brand membership. While using omnichannel routing with department spaces won’t cause security incidents, it can lead to several issues:

• Silent failures: When an agent is online and available but doesn’t belong to the relevant brand, the routing assignment may fail silently. It won't be immediately apparent why the ticket wasn’t assigned to the agent. This failure condition isn’t reflected in reporting or ticket events.
• Endless loops: In scenarios where the only available agent in a group is not a member of the ticket's brand, the routing engine may continuously attempt to assign the ticket to that agent, resulting in a loop of failed assignments.
• Delayed responses: Because omnichannel routing doesn’t recognize brands, the silent failure and endless loop issues can result in tickets becoming stuck in queues awaiting assignment to eligible agents. This can lead to delayed response times and negatively impact customer satisfaction.

Mitigating routing issues when using both features

There are three things you can do to reduce routing issues:

• Ensure alignment between group and brand assignments of agents
• Use triggers or custom queues to ensure tickets are routed to groups based on brand
• Monitor agent group and brand assignments

Ensure alignment between group and brand assignments of agents

Omnichannel routing doesn’t recognize brands, but it does assign tickets to agents based on the groups they belong to. Aligning agent group assignments with brand assignments can bridge this gap.

To align group and brand assignments for agents

1. Create or select a group of agents to handle tickets for a brand.
2. Ensure all agents in the group are also members of the brand.

Use triggers or custom queues to ensure tickets are routed to agents based on brand

When using the standard omnichannel routing queue, tickets are routed to agents in the ticket’s assigned group. You can create triggers that assign groups to tickets based on the ticket’s brand. If all agents in a brand are in a single group, this method can work. However, if the agents in a brand are split across multiple groups, custom queues will work better for you.

To use ticket triggers to assign a ticket group based on the ticket’s brand

1. Create or modify a ticket trigger to use the following condition:

   Ticket > Brand | Is | <brand name>

2. Configure the following action:

   Ticket > Group | <group name>

3. Click Save.
4. Repeat for each brand.

Custom queues provide a way for you to specify ticket routing behavior based on specific criteria, such as a ticket’s brand, while providing a larger pool of agents who can be assigned because tickets can be routed to agents in multiple groups. Make the brand a condition for the queue, and then only configure primary and secondary groups whose agents belong to that brand. This setup ensures tickets are routed only to agents with the appropriate brand membership.

To use custom queues to route tickets to groups based on the ticket’s brand

1. Create or modify a custom queue to use the following condition:

   Ticket > Brand | Is | <brand name>

2. Under Groups, select only groups whose agents are all members of the specified brand.
3. Click Save.
4. Repeat for each brand.

Monitor agent group and brand assignments

Regularly review agent assignments to ensure consistency between your group and brand membership and your routing logic.

If agents frequently move between groups or brands, the likelihood of routing failures increases significantly. We don’t recommend using brands and omnichannel routing in this scenario.