Capacity rules to balance the workload

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher
Access Admin

A capacity rule caps how much an agent holds at once, per channel. Without one, routing keeps handing work to whoever is next.

Per channel, deliberately

The limits are set separately for email, messaging and calls, because they demand different things. Someone can reasonably have a dozen emails open. Two live chats is a lot. One call is one call.

Omnichannel routing considers all of them together, which is what stops an agent on a call receiving three chats.

What counts as held

Assigned and not yet finished. A ticket the agent has set to pending, waiting on the customer, generally does not count against them, which is correct: they are not working on it.

That interacts with status discipline. A team that leaves everything on open looks permanently at capacity.

Setting the numbers

They come from your team, not from a default. Watch what people comfortably handle, and set the limit slightly above it.

  • Too low: agents idle while work waits in the queue.
  • Too high: the cap does nothing and people drown.

Start conservative and raise it. Agents notice a limit that is too low and complain; a limit that is too high produces quiet burnout instead.

Different rules for different people

Capacity rules apply to groups or individuals, so a new agent can carry less than an experienced one. That is one of the more humane things in Zendesk and it costs nothing to use.

See also

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