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Call Routing to Agents more than once

Answered


Posted Jul 31, 2019

Hi Talk PM ;-)

Derived from this

We need an option where it's possible to re-offer calls to agents that have once ignored or declined a call before the call gets the voicemail or gets disconnected when the voicemail is disabled.

The following needs to be taken into consideration:

Is the maximum queue size exceeded?

Yes = voicemail offered/ call disconnected if voicemail is disabled

No= call gets offered to available agents again and call back message repeated if enabled

Is max call wait time exceeded

Yes = voicemail offered/ call disconnected if voicemail is disabled

No= call gets offered to available agents again and call back message repeated if enabled

This an essential function to accommodate most EU call centers. No customer wants to be sent to voicemail or disconnected without an option to wait for an available agent or be offered callback.

Please vote up if you find this usefull.

#helpsome regards,
Thomas de Silva
Zendesk Consultant @ helphouse.io


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30 comments

Official

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Rohan Gupta

Zendesk Product Manager

Hello everyone,

We recently released the functionality to use Calls in Omnichannel Routing. Functionality to offer the calls to the agents more than once if the agent has declined the call earlier is part of the functionality set released with Omnichannel Routing. 

In brief: Omnichannel routing enables you to prioritize and route work items, including calls, to the best agent based on their availability and capacity. You can also use triggers, tags, and ticket fields to make changes to the destination groups and priorities as a call ticket is created earlier in the flow. Agents can also set a single unified status across multiple Zendesk channels (Support, Talk, and Messaging) with the ability to create custom statuses by admins.

The other functionality suggested to auto switch agents unified status to away/offline due to inactivity is also available as part of the functionality set.

Here are couple of articles that might be helpful to get started with Omnichannel Routing:

1) About omnichannel routing with unified agent status
2) Using Calls in omnichannel routing.

Thanks

Rohan

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Minor correction.

 

If Agent are "Away" or "Wrap-up" the call stays in queue

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I agree 100% that this needs to be an option. I have a small team, particularly at night, and it's vital that we have the option to have a call re-route to an agent that mistakenly missed the call. It's not a great client experience to have to leave a voicemail rather than get help live because of a missed accepted call they don't even know about. 

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I very much agree this is critical functionality. We have a small team and sometimes only a single person is covering the phones. If they miss a call but are available within just a few minutes, it adds a time and effort burden to both the agent and the end user to go through a voicemail process when they could have just stayed on a brief hold. Please consider adding this functionality as soon as possible.

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Please we need this option aswell. 

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This is one of the most annoying things about Zendesk Talk. We also have a very small team. Having one agent miss a call leads to a very bad experience for the customer, especially if other agents (if staffed) are stuck on a long call. (We had one call wait at least 12 minutes just this morning.)

This really needs to change.

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I know this is not a solution but we did it for our company as Zendesk coudnt help.

I have created same group of Agents for Zednesk Talk and added a routing to Group1 and if no one answers it goes to Group 2. 

in this case you have another chance to answer the phone because the conversation goes through the same group of people again

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Hi Krzysztof,

I've tried this second group option but I can't get it to work for us.  How do you get it to fallover to the second group?

Here's the example we tried:
Group 1 and Group 2 have the same users in.

Agent A and Agent B are online, in both groups. Agent B is on a call (let's call it Caller 1).
Caller 2 comes in via Group 1, Agent A misses the call.
Caller 2 continues to wait as the system identifies that Agent B is online, but on with Caller 1.
My expectation is that Caller 2 should then go to Group 2 and then go to Agent A again, but it doesn't.
In addition, when Agent B sets themselves to offline while on with Caller 1 (to go on a break or away from desk), my expectation is that Caller 2 should loop to Group 2, however it doesn't, it immediately tells Caller 2 there are no agents available, even though Agent A is still online and in Groups 1 and 2.

It seems the system is identifying that Agent A missed Caller 2, regardless of which Group it was offered in, and then doesn't offer to Agent A again?

Any help you can offer would be appreciated!

Thanks!

 

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Just to add on to this thread to save others time! Zendesk Support have advised on a ticket I raised about the above comment that "Unfortunately at this time there isn't a native way to route multiple times to the same agent.".

If anyone has found a workaround or alternative, it would be very much appreciated!

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I've already added my two-cents but I'm adding in a couple more because this is ridiculous. While we offer our callers the option to leave a voicemail or request a callback, sometimes a caller doesn't want to use that option. That's fine. That's why they're there.

But we've had a call waiting nearly 50 MINUTES today because we can't get it to route to an available agent.

It doesn't help that Zendesk doesn't provide any way for us to even see any details about these pending calls, why it might not have reached an agent, or any kind of details that gives insight about the waiting calls.

I can see how this would be less of a problem for larger call centers but when you're a small team like ours (with maybe 1-3 agents answering phones per shift), this turns into a bad experience for everyone.

Fix this.

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We've moved our contact centre to Zendesk Talk 100% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is a serious issue for us.

For calls on some teams with only 2-3 agents, it doesn't make sense that the call just doesn't loop back to the first agent if it's missed by everyone in the group.

We've seen it many times now that a call has been missed for genuine reasons and the customer gets stuck in limbo where no one can answer it anymore.

Zendesk... disappointing. Just another issue to add to the list that probably won't get fixed. Is it time to look at an alternative like Aircall?

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We have a very similar issue here. We have ten talk agents supporting two countries so notice these calls that sit in a constant loop when the call is missed. In addition to this issue, often the call is missed because the agent isn't able to accept the call / press accept. Whether this is a browser issue or a Zendesk issue, we've been unable to resolve it with Zendesk.

So, because of the fact we're unable to accept the call in some cases, the call never being re-offered to the agent even though they're in status available, the call will sit there until the caller hangs up. The only other workaround we have managed to come up with is to add a support agent from a different team to the group where the call is in a loop. Not exactly the most efficient way to manage this. 

I'm hopeful Zendesk can change this workflow allowing calls to be re-offered. I'd also like to hear if there are similar experiences out there and whether someone has found a suitable workaround.

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Neil Weldon

Zendesk Product Manager

Hello,

Update for 2022 - 

Retrying agents with a call does not work in all circumstances, especially for smaller teams. In a circumstance where an agent steps away without changing their state it could cause a call to be retried to that agent again and again if they are the only one available. As a precursor to changing the behaviour here we have on our roadmap the ability to automatically change an agents state after they miss a number of consecutive calls.

Thanks again for the feedback but this feature is not in our roadmap at the moment. It is in our backlog for future consideration.

Thanks

Product Team

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Hi @... has there been any progress on the issue of being able to retrieve callers from the queue? I have recently purchased Zendesk Support Suite for my company and this is very frustrating.  

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+1

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If it serves to an agent and they miss it, they should be put into away or offline status so they cannot be tried again, but then when someone makes themselves available again they should be available to be reserved the call.  This how most other phone systems work.  We use this with Cisco all the time. 

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Our current telephony (SwyxIT) can also deliver and queue calls multiple times. We can program the behavior of calls in and out of the queue as we wish. Especially in small service level teams this is needed, because a call can sometimes run longer until an agent becomes free. It is also no problem if the customer is then held in the queue for 5-10 minutes.

We actually wanted to switch completely to Zendesk Talk, but the fact that such an important feature is missing is absolutely frustrating. So we will not switch to Talk for the time being.

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+1

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+1

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Wanna follow up on this

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Was very surprised this wasn't available and I don't think we can use Talk until it is supported. For our organization this is a show stopper as far as talk is concerned

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Hi Neil Weldon do you have any news to this Topic (Feature Request)? Do Zendesk work on a solution?

thanks & greetings

Björn

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Neil Weldon "In a circumstance where an agent steps away without changing their state it could cause a call to be retried to that agent again and again if they are the only one available." Yes, that is no problem. If no one can answer, the customer should have the option to just wait it out, until that one single agent returns from the loo.

"Simply retrying agents with a call does not work in all circumstances, especially for smaller teams." Let your customers decide that.

Zendesk does lack basic functionality here. We have a presales team of around 3 people, of which sometimes one can be on vacation and one can be ill or just logged out to do customs work or other sit in a meeting. You have a 1-2 person team now. The likelyhood of a customer having to wait for one agent to finish a call is very high, and not having a simple endless loop is a massive impact on usability!

And no, we DON'T want to offer callbacks! We use the wait time as "filter", so unimportant calls might be reduced in times of high loads automatically, instead of each customer making us more work with less own effort.

This feature should be unbelievably easy to implement. It's stupidly simple. How can that be so difficult??? Just ignore the "agent has already missed the call" counter if a specific setting is applied, and there you go.

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Neil Weldon Are there big technical limitations to overcome with implementing this functionality? As noted by several people here, the inability of Zendesk Talk to reroute a missed call to an agent can result in a horrible customer experience where customers wait for an hour or longer to get connected, even when there's an agent available.

This wouldn't be as much of an issue if Zendesk Talk exposed the phone queue more fully, so that we would be able to see the phone numbers of queued calls and which line it's dialing into. If that were visible, then we could have that available tech attempt to call out to the customer at the phone number from which they're calling in.

I strongly urge your team to reconsider including this in your roadmap, as this is a massive pain point for several of your customers.

This isn't the first time this has been requested:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4409222620314-ReRoute-Missed-Calls

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4487497392666-Fix-routing-of-calls-for-agents-that-miss-or-decline

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Neil Weldon

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi all, 

This is actively being worked as part of bringing Talk into the new omnichannel routing that is in EAP at this time for Support and Messaging. Also going to hit EAP very soon is the agent state management across channels I mentioned before. The Talk features will hit EAP in the May timeframe. 

Thanks

Neil 

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Neil Weldon What exactly is worked on, what can we expect? "Endless rerouting" or just the visible phone numbers?

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Can we please get an update on this functionality. This is causing such a poor user experience for our customers, which has resulted in several escalations. I may have to switch back to Zoom Phones because of this. :(

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I completely agree, without such a basic process of re-trying agents more than once, Zendesk Talk is just not an option for us. What is the maximum queue time for if not to keep customers on hold whilst waiting for an agent to pass them to, rather than hanging up on them because 'we're busy'?

Zendesk Talk needs to have a similar process as Live Chat - re-trying the available agents more than once and then setting them to Away if unanswered so that the call can sit on hold until an agent is available again. There should also be a visible queue like Chat that can be picked up, should another agent be 'Away' or 'Transfer only' but able to grab it.

Can we have an update on what is being worked on and when it will be available please? I'm keen to bring in Zendesk Talk to unite all of our contact channels and improve efficiency for the team but will not sacrifice our customers' satisfaction and their overall  customer experience as a result.

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Neil Weldon

Zendesk Product Manager

We are working on adding Talk to the omnichannel routing experience which is currently in EAP for Support (routing  and assignment of emails directly to agents) and Messaging. When completed this will allow for us to retry agents who are part of the group until such time as the call times out in the queue. This will also have tickets created as soon as calls come in. This will allow you to run triggers on the tickets to change the group and priority - eg ticket requestor is a known VIP so change priority to urgent.

As part of the Unified Agent Statuses work which is also in EAP - we have created a centralised area for agents to control their state across all channels and have included the ability for you to to create custom states that match your workflow needs. As part of this we will be adding an idle timeout where we will automatically move an agent state to offline due to inactivity. 

Both the Routing and Unified Agent Statuses work will be launched together in term of general availability and will be aimed at customers who are in Agent workspace and using Messaging.  We are working on how best to get the Talk capabilities rolled into the routing EAP.  

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Hello! 

My client is now facing the same problem. The team has 3 people and if none of them pick up, the call will not be repeated and will end. Is this situation resolved? I haven't found a solution and it's been almost 1 year... :( 

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