Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
An agent getting nothing while a queue fills up has eight possible causes. Five of them are checkable in two minutes.
Why does this agent receive no tickets?
- One agent receives nothing while colleagues are busy.
- A queue grows and nothing is handed out.
- It worked yesterday.
Resolution steps
1. Their status
The first thing to check, every time. Routing only assigns to agents with an eligible status, spare capacity and, where skills are in use, the right skills.
Eligible does not mean the same thing on every channel, and this is where the confusion usually sits:
- Calls need the agent to be online.
- Messaging needs the agent to be online.
- Email goes to agents who are online or away.
So an agent on away keeps receiving email while calls and messaging pass them by. That is one status producing two different experiences, and it explains both "I set myself away and tickets keep arriving" and "I am here and the phone never rings".
There is a fourth standard status that is easy to overlook: Transfers only takes nothing new at all, only tickets somebody has already looked at and is passing on. An agent who selected it and forgot will look available and receive nothing.
2. They are at capacity
An agent holding their maximum receives nothing more until they close something. Working as designed, and it looks identical to being broken.
On messaging they can also be over their maximum without having done anything: a conversation that had gone quiet counts again the moment the customer replies. Routing then gives them nothing on that channel until they are back under the number.
3. They are not in the queue's group
Queues hand out to specific groups. An agent outside them gets nothing from that queue however available they are.
4. Skills do not match
Where skills are in use, a ticket needing a skill only goes to agents who have it. Zendesk will not let you create a skill with nobody on it, so the version of this that happens is slower: the one or two people who held it left, changed role, or are away, and the tickets needing it queue behind them.
5. Idle timeout moved them
Agents are moved to away or offline automatically after a period of inactivity, set on the Status timeouts page. The timer is anywhere between 5 and 1440 minutes, so on an account with it set low, a meeting is enough. Someone comes back to find they have been receiving nothing, or on away, only email.
Two things sit next to this and are not the same. Closing the Agent Workspace without signing out, which includes shutting the laptop or letting it sleep, sets somebody offline straight away, as does losing the connection. And the account's own inactivity session timeout is a different setting that does not touch these statuses at all, so do not go looking for the answer there.
6. The queue has no group with anyone available
The account-level version. The queues dashboard shows this: work waiting with nobody eligible.
7. The email ticket never entered routing
Different in kind from the six above, and the one to check when nothing is moving rather than one person receiving nothing. Calls and messaging arrive ready to route. An email ticket does not: unless it matches a custom queue, it needs a trigger to put a group on it and add the auto-routing tag before it enters the standard queue at all. Without that it sits unassigned, and no agent is at fault.
Email here also covers the web form, side conversations and the API, which is where this usually turns up: a new intake route was added and nobody extended the trigger.
8. Brands, on an account using department spaces
The invisible one. Omnichannel routing does not know which brands an agent belongs to. An agent who is online, available and in the right group but not a member of the ticket's brand can be offered work that then fails to assign, and Zendesk says so plainly: that failure is not reflected in reporting or ticket events. Where such an agent is the only one available, routing can keep retrying in a loop and the ticket sits in the queue.
The fix is alignment rather than a setting: make sure everyone in a group handling a brand is also a member of that brand, and route by brand with triggers or custom queues.
Where to look
The queues dashboard and the agent status page answer four of these seven at a glance, which is faster than asking the agent what they are seeing.
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