| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| December 5, 2024 | December 5, 2024 | December 11, 2024 |
Zendesk is excited to announce that omnichannel routing is on by default for all new and trial accounts.
This announcement includes the following topics:
What is changing?
Originally, admins had to turn on omnichannel routing and configure not just the omnichannel routing options, but also ticket triggers for each service channel in use to ensure all new and open tickets had a group assigned and email tickets had the auto-routing tag. This manual setup improved somewhat with the release of custom queues for Professional plans and above, but still required several steps to begin using omnichannel routing.
Now, all new trial and Zendesk accounts have omnichannel routing and unified agent status turned on as their default routing experience. Additionally, the auto-routing tag used for group-based routing of email tickets is pre-configured. All calls and messaging conversations are routed automatically. The only decision admins must make is whether they want to use queue-based or group-based routing and then follow the in-product instructions to complete their email routing setup.
These changes provides the following benefits:
- Admins no longer need to manually configure routing channel by channel.
- New and open tickets for email, messaging conversations, and calls are automatically routed to agents in order of priority.
- Unified agent statuses make it possible for agents to set a single status that applies to email, messaging, and call channels. Furthermore, on Professional plans and above, admins can define custom statuses.
- Additional routing configuration options are available, such as assigning tickets based on a ticket's priority or how close it is to breaching an SLA, required and optional skills, and assigning tickets based on agent availability or round-robin.
- On Professional plans and above, customers can define custom queues to further prioritize their tickets and expedite assignment by routing to multiple primary and secondary groups of agents.
- Omnichannel routing prevents agents from "cherry picking" tickets or cases that they want to work on, resulting in a more equitably distributed workload.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Our goal is to help all Zendesk customers realize the greatest possible return on their customer support investment, and we believe omnichannel routing is the best way to provide that. By making it easier to get started with omnichannel routing, more customers can use it to reduce first reply times, increase agent efficiency and productivity, and improve adherence to SLAs.
What do I need to do?
Omnichannel routing will be available and on for all new and trial customers. It will work automatically for messaging conversations and calls, but will require some additional setup for email channels. This doesn't affect existing accounts. For more information, see Turning on and setting up omnichannel routing.
If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.