Routing Zendesk Talk calls to multiple agents at the same time

Agree with the majority of the community here. Why would you not give us the option to create our own routing plan? Please build this in to the platform.

FYI, we have dropped Zendesk because of this and moved to an alternative,

This worries me a lot.  We've been growing our team tremendously over the past few months,and I've been pushing to go all in with ZenDesk.  In fact, I found this discussion as I'm trying to make the business justification for moving from Professional to Enterprise Suite (including Talk) and seeing this doesn't fill me with confidence.  Is ZenDesk focused on delivering solutions for small and growing teams, or are they punching above their weight, targeting big companies, and alienating their customer base? 

I don't understand why there's so few opportunities for customization within ZenDesk.  There's no such thing as one-size-fits-all, so it only makes sense that we be able to adjust and tweak as necessary to best suit our needs.  

THIS IS A NO BRAINER! It makes no sense that group ring is not available. 

Can you let us know what the reasoning is behind only allowing the one ring strategy? we purchased the product and got everything all set up and then we started missing calls and will have to cancel its very frustrating... 

Hello, +1 for this feature.  Most SMB isn't a call center.  Having the ability to ring all agents at once seems like it's a very popular request!

We were in the middle of implementing Zendesk Talk. I couldn't seem to get how to route calls to agents with certain skills (language) and found this thread. Do you guys have any new info on this? Ringing one agent at a timeis just not feasible for our group of support where 70% of our agents have a sort of on-and-off support responsibility. This really is vital for us. When you add a feature enabling the agents to flexibly "chose" who answers the call, we go forward with the Talk implementation.

We need this aswell, please add it to Zendesk. We need to respond to certain phonecalls within a minute. If I walk to the toilet, then my phone rings for a few minutes with me being absent, then switches to another collegeau. But we really need to pick it up within that one minute.

Hi all, we have just signed up to the Zendesk suite as it seems to give us the support platform that we need. The one function we are disappointed with so far is not having the ability to have the calls ring simultaneously. As we are a small team of 4 (echoed by a few other commenters here), we need to be able to pick up calls within the first minute instead of having the calls bouncing around agents. 

+1 for this request as well. At the moment we're having to ask our developers to use the Talk API to automatically set our status to away when we lock or shutdown our computers since it doesn't currently seem to be able to do that.

We've also had to give all our agents the ability to set other people's status to unavailable when the other person gets up to talk to someone and forget to change their own status, even though they've locked their computer.

If there is one thing I believe would fix this issue for everyone involved, both big companies and small, is to be able to choose between round-robin and hunt-groups/simultaneous calling. This is bare-bones functionality and I'm surprised Talk has been around this long without even a foreseeable roadmap item to develop it. Simply adding this feature would significantly and directly increase Zendesk's revenue, so I find it hard to believe the effort wouldn't be worth it.

Is it possible there's some kind of hardware/software limitation between Twilio and Zendesk that actually prevents this feature from being built?

I was just about to move from Ring Central to Zendesk Talk. Sold it to my team and business. Then I did some comprehensive testing and found out that it didn't call agents simultaneously. No application does everything.. There is always going to be something that someone wants and we were prepared to make certain sacrifices in order to move, however, this is a basic requirement, especially when compared to Zendesk competitors. 

You are powered by Twilio right? 

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2009/05/dialing-multiple-numbers-simultaneously-with-twilio.html

I took the amount of voters for this and worked out potential revenue at an average of £200 per month if we assume this is a deal break.

That is £184,800 per year.. Surely your product teams can prioritise this??

We have just started with ZenDesk after moving from FreshDesk, which we were not happy with. After implementing, we discovered this ZenDesk "feature" that you can only do round robin call routing with a set 30 second delay. This is horrible, and makes it almost unusable for us. We just assumed that it would behave in the same way as the other tools we have used. Configuring the 30 seconds would be a little helpful, but really we NEED all agents phones to ring simultaneously in order for customer calls to be answered in a timely manner. Please reconsider the priority on this and look at implementing ASAP. The other features of ZenDesk are great, but this is a real killer, and I imagine puts off lots of smaller teams. Small teams grow into big teams you know...

This is also a huge issue for us.  We recently started using Talk (longtime ZD customer) and this is something I also (mistakenly) assumed was a feature.  Like all the others, we are a small team, and having it ring for one person for 30 sec and then move on is terrible for us.  We need the flexibility of ringing on all agents' desks so the first one can pick it up.  I am now exploring other options. 

Any update from Zendesk on this?

I am with Marcus. Any update on this because this is just plain silly to not have basic functionality like this.  Then to expect customers to pay extra for Round Robin is extremely unfair. 

Zendesk,

We are missing calls and losing revenue opportunities because of this.  We only have a few support agents who answer calls part time and are frequently working with other customers, so we have no idea who will be available to answer calls at any point in time.  We need to have Zendesk ring their phones simultaneously so the caller doesn't have to wait for such a long time.  We have a very high rate of abandoned calls because the wait time is so lengthy.  Please fix this.  This request goes back over 2 years and Zendesk users deserve better.

I've already commented over a year ago, but I'll add once again that it looks like ZD is basically ignoring any businesses other than those with dedicated phone support personnel.

This doesn't bode well for ZD's long-term success.

Could we at least get some explanation from the product manager why this isn't being addressed?

FINALLY received an answer from ZenDesk as to why you cannot ring everyone's phones at once.  Apparently Zendesk wants to run all of our businesses, and when we don't provide the best service I'm assuming they are going to reimburse us for lost revenue.  

FROM ZENDESK TODAY:

I apologize for the frustration but there is reason for this. There is a best practice advisory for why we dont offer "hunt groups" where a single call rings multiple lines. This is a function of many older telephony systems and the reason behind the best practice of avoiding them is that it creates unequal work distribution on your team. For example. If John is a great agent and always picks up on the first ring then you may have agent Joe that will learn to only pick up on the 3rd or 4th ring because he knows John will pick up as soon as a call comes in. This can create agent burnout and a poor work environment. With Zendesk Talk we seek to avoid this and create agent accountability and transparency so that everyone gets an equal workload. 

My response:

Respectfully, you don’t run my business, I do.  Your position of your software dictating my business is really unbelievable and all the more reason that we will continue to evaluate other solutions.  You have HUNDREDS of customers requesting this, if not THOUSANDS.

There are so many great reports that help us manage the situation and prevent burn out and a poor work environment.  It is our responsibility and our dedication to our team, many of whom I have worked with for over 20 years, to manage our business.  When your software forces each user to interact with their computer, go offline, sign out, whatever just to get up and get a cup of coffee rather than walk away knowing that everyone else’s phone will ring and a call won’t be missed, is the opposite of what your email suggests that Zendesk is doing to “help” us.  We actually missed a call the other day because one of the team left their desk to work out in our company gym (in house, for free) and the call did not ring on anyone else’s system.

I know that we are all just dumb business owners and that we should rely on your best practices, but this response is amazingly short-sighted.  Zendesk should listen to their customers, and there are many, who have asked for you to turn this on.  I believe that you use 8x8 as your telephony host, and I know that their platform can support it.

I would compare this to a knife company only selling dull knives so that dumb people don’t cut themselves.

Hey cool, I've got a meeting with my Director tomorrow, we were going to go over some process and tooling changes, but perhaps I should be running those by the ZenDesk dev team to make sure they meet their best practices standards...

Sigh, once again this is Zendesk telling us how we should run our company.

And, again, this assumes some huge support pool.

We have 4 people total on our team, 2 devs, 1 support and 1 dogsbody/founder (me). We're all willing to pitch in equally, but because of the round-robin ringing, we can't.

Again, this sure seems to indicate that ZD isn't really concerned with the smaller/medium-size business market. I think they're missing the boat here entirely.

I apologize for the frustration but there is reason for this. There is a best practice advisory for why we dont offer "hunt groups" where a single call rings multiple lines. This is a function of many older telephony systems and the reason behind the best practice of avoiding them is that it creates unequal work distribution on your team. For example. If John is a great agent and always picks up on the first ring then you may have agent Joe that will learn to only pick up on the 3rd or 4th ring because he knows John will pick up as soon as a call comes in. This can create agent burnout and a poor work environment. With Zendesk Talk we seek to avoid this and create agent accountability and transparency so that everyone gets an equal workload.

Why enforce a policy decision like this, instead of providing the machinery needed by the companies actually using ZD Talk. I.e., ZD could provide tools to see if in fact this situation is occurring, and then let the company in question deal with it at the policy-making level (or not).

Yikes. Thanks for sharing Chris. 

I understand the logic behind it, and it may work for some companies, but not for us. If "agent Joe" ins't doing their job, thats my problem, not an excuse for Zendesk to not provide a feature. 

My team members manage a variety of tasks throughout the day and if someone is busy and forgets to manually take themselves offline, that caller won't be answered for at least another 30 seconds (if they even stay on the line that long) while there are many other reps waiting for a call. Providing a group ring feature allows for our customers to be helped by the first available agent. Isn't that kinda the point? 

@Marcus: Yes, that's exactly the point.

The frustrating thing is that ZD Talk works so well in all other respects, so we're not really motivated to look for an alternate solution. It just needs to have a simultaneous-ring function and let us decide whether to use it or not.

Chris, I'll chime in to support this request. That explanation you got is a bunch of BS. Perhaps the real reason has to do with the fact that we're paying ZD for the time the caller is making their way through the round-robin search for an agent and ZD would lose some of that revenue if we were able to answer the calls faster. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.

No, I assume good faith on their part, no cynicism needed.

Just a broken decision.

I apologize for the frustration but there is reason for this. There is a best practice advisory for why we dont offer "hunt groups" where a single call rings multiple lines. This is a function of many older telephony systems and the reason behind the best practice of avoiding them is that it creates unequal work distribution on your team. For example. If John is a great agent and always picks up on the first ring then you may have agent Joe that will learn to only pick up on the 3rd or 4th ring because he knows John will pick up as soon as a call comes in. This can create agent burnout and a poor work environment. With Zendesk Talk we seek to avoid this and create agent accountability and transparency so that everyone gets an equal workload.

That's a bummer to hear. This is one of the reasons we are moving away from Zendesk Talk.  It's affecting our customers.

I just chiming into the conversation again! Our company also has a small team and the impact that round "robbing" is having is that we miss calls regularly. I have 2 remote people and myself and they help other customers like (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000291448/comments/360002270348). We aren't a call centre so the round robin doesn't work and it impacts business. In fact I can't remember the last time any phone system I used didn't have hunt groups???!!!?? Ringcentral, BT, Twilio, Horizon

By the way, Zendesk talk is powered by Twilio https://www.twilio.com/blog/2009/05/dialing-multiple-numbers-simultaneously-with-twilio.html . Just saying...

I have started writing some example Twillio API code for you. This took me about 5 minutes. Happy to come to Zendesk and sit down with some of the developers to help.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
  <Dial action="/handleDialStatus.php" method="GET">
    <Number>{{Agentnumber1}}</Number>
    <Number>{{Agentnumber2}}</Number>
    <Number>{{Agentnumber3}}</Number>
  </Dial>
</Response>

Hi there - we are looking to remove Zendesk if simultaneous ringing isn't available very soon

Hi all, many of you say you're switching from Zendesk to other services that offer this functionality. Which services have you switched to? I'm also looking to leave Zendesk for this specific reason. Thank you!