Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Agents set to away automatically when they stop working. Prevents conversations going nowhere, and irritates people if set too tightly.
Set it
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Status timeouts.
- For each unified agent status, change its idle status to something other than Keep current status. Until you do, there is no idle timeout on that status at all.
- Enter the idle timer, anywhere between 5 and 1440 minutes.
- Set the disconnection status on the same page.
- Tell agents it exists and how it works.
It needs omnichannel routing and the Agent Workspace. And check what you inherited: accounts that turned idle timeouts on before 8 September 2025 carry a default idle status of Away or Offline with a 10 minute timer, while newer accounts default to Keep current status and no timer. That single difference explains why one account flips people to away and another never does.
The problem it solves
An agent who goes to a meeting without changing their status is still marked available. Live conversations route to them and wait, and the customer sees nothing happening.
Idle timeout catches that automatically.
Set it generously
Long enough that reading a long ticket, taking a call, or thinking about a difficult reply does not trigger it. An agent thrown to away while genuinely working loses their place in the queue and learns to distrust the whole mechanism.
What counts as activity
Mouse or keyboard movement inside the Zendesk browser tab, and nothing else. Somebody on the phone, or reading a document in another window, registers as idle while working hard.
That is worth saying out loud, because agents assume it knows more than it does. One exception: a status set through the API resets the timer, so an integration that touches statuses keeps people looking active.
Which one wins
You set two things on that page, and they can happen at once. If somebody drops off the network while already idle, the disconnection status overwrites the idle status. So the disconnection setting is the one that decides what a colleague sees when a laptop closes mid-afternoon.
And a change here does not reach agents who are already working on tickets until they refresh the page. Testing it on somebody who has had a tab open all morning proves nothing.
Coming back
Returning to available should be quick and obvious. If it is awkward, agents will avoid going away at all, which is the opposite of what you wanted.
It is not attendance monitoring
Idle time reflects meetings, phone calls and thinking. Reading it as time not working is both wrong and the fastest way to get agents gaming their status.
Tune it after a fortnight
Ask agents whether it fires while they are working. That question, once, gets the setting right.
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