Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Omnichannel routing hands work to agents rather than letting them pick, across email, messaging and calls in one system.
What it replaces
Without it, agents work from views: they look at a list and choose. That is fine for a small team and produces two problems at scale. The easy tickets get taken first, and nobody can tell who is busy.
With it, Zendesk assigns work based on who is available, what they can handle, and how much they already have.
The pieces
- Queues. Which tickets are waiting and in what order.
- Capacity rules. How much each agent can hold at once, per channel.
- Agent statuses. Whether someone is available, and for what.
- Skills, optionally, so work goes to someone who can do it.
- A routing trigger, for email, if you use the standard queue. Messaging and calls arrive ready to route; an email ticket only enters the standard queue once a trigger has put a group and the auto-routing tag on it. Custom queues match on their own conditions and need neither.
They work together. Turning routing on without setting capacity gives you assignment without any sense of load, and turning it on without the trigger gives you a live system that quietly ignores your email.
What it leaves alone
Only tickets with a status of New or Open are routed. A ticket on Pending or On-hold stays with whoever has it and is never handed to somebody else, which is usually what you want and occasionally not: a ticket parked by an agent who then goes on leave sits there until a person moves it.
Why omnichannel
It considers email, messaging and calls together. An agent on a call is not also handed three chats, which is what happens when each channel routes independently.
When it is worth it
Once you have more than a handful of agents, or more than one live channel. Below that, views work and routing is configuration you have to maintain for no gain.
The clearest signal is agents cherry-picking, or a queue where the oldest tickets keep getting older while new ones are answered.
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