Getting up to date with Omnichannel Routing in Zendesk
Omnichannel Routing was released over a year ago to shift assignment from Groups to Agent based assignment. Since its original release this feature has seen tons of updates and allows for a lot more customizability. This article shows you what's new and explains how to use these new options.
Last week Zendesk announced that all new instances will have Omnichannel Routing enabled by default. This means that all new customers will get the routing experience, agent status and access to queues, skills and capacity rules enables by default, replacing the old trigger based assignment rules.
Ticket assignment in Zendesk has traditionally been based on triggers and groups. A ticket is created, and based on the form, email address used or specific custom fields we can assign the ticket to a group. A ticket send to support@acme.inc gets assigned to the support group, or a user submitting a form while selecting login issues as a topic, get routed to our devops group in Zendesk.
This worked, but with all tickets being assigned to a group making sure the right ticket is picked up by the right agent gets tricky since it's basically one giant bucket of tickets offered to your agents. You can use views to sort by SLA, priority or creation date, but you can't really force an agent to work on that specific ticket. (You should't actually force anything to anyone in life, but you try to make a pretty good argument to make them work on that ticket 😇)
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With the arrival of Omnichannel routing we can implement a more nuanced system to assign tickets. With omnichannel routing all tickets are placed in a virtual queue. Based on criteria you select, and combined with agent availability the system will assign tickets to specific agents. When a ticket is handled by the agent, the next best ticket is assigned to them until the entire backlog is processed.
Earlier this year I wrote an introduction to Omnichannel Routing which goes into this process in detail, so take a look if you want to grasp the basics, before diving into this article.
Thomas Verschoren
Which ticket gets assigned first?
Omnichannel Routing assigns tickets based on a queue. A ticket is created and is inserted in the System Queue. The topmost ticket of that queue gets assigned to the best available agent, while new tickets are added to the queue upon creation (or update).
