Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Chats reaching the wrong department has four causes, and agent availability is the usual one: a department with nobody available cannot receive.
Live chat is on its way out: Zendesk removes it on 31 January 2028 and no longer sells it to new customers. What is below still works until then, but any effort you put into it has an end date.
Why does my department routing not work?
- Chats arriving with the wrong team.
- A department that receives nothing.
- Visitors choosing a department and reaching somebody else.
Resolution steps
1. Nobody in that department is available
Check this first. A department with no available agent cannot receive, so the chat falls elsewhere. Check who is in it and whether they are online for chat specifically.
One thing that makes this look inexplicable: outside your scheduled operating hours, any agent signed in to Chat has their availability set to Invisible, and they cannot change it themselves. So the agent is sitting there, believes they are online, and the department has nobody.
2. An agent is in several departments
Then they receive from all of them, which looks like routing ignoring the choice. Check memberships rather than the routing rules.
3. The department is disabled
Departments appear on the pre-chat form automatically once they exist, so a missing one is usually a disabled one. It is a checkbox per department, and disabling it takes the department out of the pre-chat form and out of chat triggers alike.
4. The account schedule is overriding the department's
You can give each department its own schedule, and this is where people are caught: operating hours applied to the whole account override the hours applied to departments. A department scheduled until six, in an account that closes at five, closes at five.
Operating hours sit in the Chat dashboard under Settings > Account > Operating hours. Check the account tab before the department one.
Check availability first
The chat dashboard shows who is available per department. That answers the first two causes at a glance, and they account for most cases.
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