Zendesk Omnichannel Routing: A Guide to Automated Inquiry Assignment

Zendesk Omnichannel Routing is an advanced feature that automates the assignment of customer inquiries to agents, based on real-time availability and skills. Unlike traditional routing, where tickets are manually assigned to groups or agents through filtering, Zendesk Omnichannel Routing optimizes the process by automatically assigning inquiries. This is done based on agents' availability, skills, and capacity rules, allowing agents to efficiently handle tickets from various channels, such as email, chat, and phone. This creates an efficient workflow that improves agents' customer service experience and working conditions.

Key Features of Omnichannel Routing

The system utilizes several core components to manage how work is distributed among the team:

• Agent statuses: Agents can set their status as "Online," "Away," "Transfer only," or "Offline," indicating their availability for new tickets. It’s also possible to add customized statuses to meet specific needs.
• Capacity rules: To prevent agent overload, capacity rules define how many tickets an agent can handle simultaneously. For example, agents working with complex inquiries may have a lower capacity than first-line agents.
• Skill-based routing: Agents can be assigned tickets based on specific skills, such as language or technical expertise. This ensures that the most relevant agents handle tickets they are qualified to solve, improving the quality and efficiency of customer service.
• Queues: In times of high volume, queues can be created to ensure that important tickets are prioritized. If agents become overloaded or unavailable, tickets are rerouted to a fallback team, ensuring continuity in customer service.

Advantages of Omnichannel Routing

1. Improved response time: Tickets are assigned to agents with available capacity, leading to faster response times. This provides customers with a better experience as their inquiries are handled more quickly.
2. Optimal workflow: By matching agents with tickets they are comfortable or experienced with, both productivity and agent satisfaction increase.
3. Flexibility and scalability: Omnichannel routing is easy to build upon and adapt as the business grows or needs change, making it ideal for companies experiencing growth or fluctuating demand.

Understanding Standard and Custom Queues

The omnichannel routing configuration settings apply to all of your queues. There are two types of queues available:

• Standard omnichannel routing queue: This is the default queue used when you turn on omnichannel routing and haven't created custom queues. Tickets routed through the standard queue go to agents in the group specified in the ticket's group field.
• Custom omnichannel routing queues: These are defined by admins, and tickets are inserted into the first queue they match the conditions for. Custom queues can route tickets to multiple primary and secondary groups.

Workflow Example: Prioritizing VIP Customers

You can use omnichannel routing to help expedite, prioritize, and route requests from these customers to make sure they stay happy. This recipe uses triggers, tags, and ticket fields to prioritize calls for VIP customers and transfer them to the VIP Triage group. Now, tickets created by calls from end users with the tag VIP are assigned to the VIP Triage group of agents with an urgent priority. Omnichannel routing will assign the calls in order of priority and time it was received to an agent in the VIP Triage with an eligible status and spare capacity.

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