Understanding how omnichannel routing uses queues to route work to agents

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Omnichannel routing assigns new and open tickets from email (including web form, side conversations, and API), calls, and messaging directly to agents based on agent availability and capacity and, on some plans, can be configured to also factor in service level agreement (SLA) targets, ticket priority, and skills.

The standard omnichannel routing configuration directs all eligible tickets into a single queue, assigning work to agents based on the ticket's assigned group. If a single queue is insufficient for your use case, you can create additional custom omnichannel routing queues. You must have the Agent Workspace to use omnichannel routing.

This article contains the following topics:

• Essential facts about omnichannel routing queues
• Using custom queues with omnichannel routing
• Understanding how omnichannel routing orders tickets within queues

Essential facts about omnichannel routing queues

Using multiple queues can be a valuable aspect of your omnichannel routing configuration. However, it's important to understand how queues work before implementing them. Keep the following essential facts about queues in mind:

• The omnichannel routing configuration settings apply to all of your queues.
• When a new ticket is created, ticket triggers fire first. Then omnichannel routing immediately attempts to assign it to an agent. If no agent is available to take it, the ticket is added to the appropriate queue.
• There are two types of queues in omnichannel routing:
  • Standard omnichannel routing queue: This is the default queue used by omnichannel routing when you turn on omnichannel routing and haven't created custom queues or when tickets don't meet the conditions of your custom queues but are otherwise eligible to be routed by omnichannel routing. Sometimes this is referred to as group-based omnichannel routing because tickets routed through the standard queue go to agents in the group specified in the ticket's group field. The standard queue isn't listed on the Queues page in Admin Center.
  • Custom omnichannel routing queues: (Professional plans and above for Zendesk Suite, Support, Talk, and Chat plans) These are custom queues defined by admins. When using custom queues, tickets are inserted into the first queue they match the conditions for. Custom queues can route tickets to multiple primary and secondary groups. If a ticket is routed through a custom queue, omnichannel routing ignores the ticket's group field and uses the queue's primary and secondary groups.
    • Subqueues: (Enterprise plans only) Custom queues can be split into up to five subqueues to distribute certain percentages of tickets that meet the custom queue's conditions to different primary and secondary groups. The percentages for subqueues must total 100%. Which subqueue any given ticket is inserted into is randomized.
• The auto-routing tag isn't used by custom queues. Regardless of the presence of the auto-routing tag, all email tickets, messaging conversations, and calls are automatically evaluated for matches to custom queues. However, email tickets that don't match any custom queues must have the auto-routing tag if you want them to be routed through the standard omnichannel routing queue.
• Omnichannel routing matches tickets to queues in the order the queues appear on the Queues page. Tickets are added to the first queue they meet the conditions for.
• Tickets that don't match the conditions for any of your custom queues are inserted into the standard omnichannel routing queue. However, omnichannel routing prioritizes all tickets routed through custom queues over those routed through the standard omnichannel routing queue, regardless of the ticket's priority.
• The way your order tickets, whether by priority and timestamp or time to SLA breach, applies to both the standard omnichannel routing queue and custom queues.
• When an agent is eligible to receive work from multiple queues, tickets from the queue with the higher priority are assigned before tickets from a queue with a lower priority. See Creating custom omnichannel routing queues.
• After a ticket has been assigned to an agent, it leaves the queue.
• Call tickets can’t be reassigned by omnichannel routing. Email and messaging tickets can be reassigned, but your routing configuration determines whether reassignments occur through custom queues or the standard queue.
  • On Team and Growth plans, tickets can't re-enter a custom queue after being assigned to an agent. However, if a ticket becomes eligible for re-routing, it's inserted into the standard omnichannel routing queue based on its routing-eligibility timestamp and routed based on the ticket's assigned group.
  • On Professional plans and above, you can configure omnichannel routing to reassign tickets through custom queues. When configured, tickets that are reassigned back to a group after being assigned to an agent are inserted into the first matching queue. If the ticket doesn't meet the conditions for any custom queues, it's inserted into the standard omnichannel routing queue and routed based on the ticket's assigned group.
• You can report on the performance of your custom queues in Explore. See Explore recipe: Reporting on custom omnichannel queue performance.

Using custom queues with omnichannel routing

Omnichannel routing is Zendesk's most sophisticated and complete routing solution. It provides consistent routing logic across channels and considers many factors when assigning work to agents. For many use cases, the single, standard omnichannel routing queue that's activated when you turn on omnichannel routing is sufficient. When relying on the standard omnichannel routing queue, tickets must be assigned to a group to be routed to an agent with omnichannel routing, and email tickets must have the auto-routing tag. Think of this as group-based omnichannel routing.

In some cases, it's not realistic or desirable to have your tickets routed to the single group assigned to the ticket. Creating custom queues allows you to route work to multiple groups based on the queue the tickets are assigned to. Multiple queues also give you the option to define secondary or "overflow" groups that receive tickets through a queue only if all agents in the primary groups are unavailable. When you assign multiple primary and secondary groups to a queue, omnichannel routing treats all primary groups as a single pool of agents, and when necessary, expands it to include all agents in the secondary groups as well. When you use queue-based routing, omnichannel routing uses the queue's primary and secondary groups to assign the ticket to an agent, ignoring any group that might be specified on the ticket itself.

For more information, see Creating additional omnichannel routing queues.

Understanding how omnichannel routing orders tickets within queues

As soon as a ticket is eligible for routing, omnichannel routing attempts to assign it to an eligible and available agent. When using the standard queue, ticket triggers automatically run when a ticket is created or updated, then omnichannel routing attempts to assign the ticket to an available agent in the ticket's group; if no agents in the group are available, the ticket is inserted into the queue. When using custom queues, ticket triggers automatically run when a ticket is created or updated, then omnichannel routing matches the ticket to a queue and attempts to assign it immediately to an agent in the queue's primary or secondary groups; if no agents in any of the queue's groups are available, the ticket is inserted into the queue. If a ticket doesn't match the conditions for any custom queues but has an assigned group, omnichannel routing attempts to assign the ticket to an aailable agent in the ticket's group and, if no agent in the group is available, inserts the ticket into the standard queue.

When tickets are inserted into a queue, there are two ways you can configure omnichannel routing to insert and order tickets within queues: ticket priority and timestamp or time to SLA breach. The standard configuration uses the time at which a ticket becomes eligible for routing and, on Professional plans and above, the ticket's priority.

Ordering tickets by priority and timestamp

In the standard omnichannel routing configuration, there are four characteristics of a ticket that omnichannel routing tracks to determine its place within a queue:

• Ticket eligibility for routing
• Routing eligibility timestamps
• Routing ineligibility time
• Ticket priority (Professional plans and above)

Ticket eligibility for routing

Ticket eligibility for routing by omnichannel routing depends on whether the tickets are entering the standard queue or custom queues.

For tickets to be eligible to enter the standard omnichannel routing queue, including tickets that don't match the conditions for any of your custom queues, the following must be true:

• Assigned to a group
• In a status or status category of New or Open
• Unassigned
• (Email tickets only) Has the auto-routing tag

For tickets to be eligible to enter a custom omnichannel routing queue, the following must be true:

• In a status or status category of New or Open
• Unassigned

Conversely, if any of the following conditions are true, a ticket isn't eligible for routing by omnichannel routing in either the standard queue or custom queues:

• The ticket isn't assigned to a group and doesn't match a custom queue.
• The ticket is assigned to an agent.
• The ticket has a status (or status category) of Pending, On Hold, or Solved.
• The ticket has been soft deleted.
• (Email tickets and the standard queue only) The ticket doesn't have the auto-routing tag.

Routing eligibility timestamps

There are plenty of scenarios when tickets will change back and forth between eligible and ineligible for routing with omnichannel routing. That means omnichannel routing needs to track two types of routing eligibility timestamps: initial and subsequent.

• The initial eligible for routing timestamp is when a ticket becomes eligible for routing through omnichannel routing for the first time.
• A subsequent eligible for routing timestamp is when a ticket becomes eligible again for routing through omnichannel routing after having already been eligible and ineligible previously.

Routing ineligibility time

Omnichannel routing tracks the time tickets spend being ineligible for routing and uses this to determine which routing timestamp to use when inserting a ticket back into the routing queue. This is referred to as the routing ineligibility time.

When a ticket's ineligibility for routing has never lasted 15 days or more, the initial eligible for routing timestamp determines the ticket's place in the routing queue. However, when a ticket's ineligibility period extends to 15 days or more, omnichannel routing uses the latest subsequent eligible for routing timestamp when inserting the ticket back into the routing queue.

Note: The switch at 15 days isn't exact. Instead, a job runs regularly to evaluate routing ineligibility times and determines which eligibility timestamp to use. The first time the job completes after a ticket reaches 15 days of ineligibility, omnichannel routing switches from using the ticket's initial eligible for routing timestamp (or previous subsequent eligible for routing timestamp) to its latest subsequent eligible for routing timestamp.

Checking ticket ineligibility for routing prevents performance issues caused by tracking an ever-growing number of timestamps and accounts for decreasing priority as tickets age.

Ticket priority

On Professional plans and above, omnichannel routing automatically orders tickets based on priority first and then by their routing eligibility timestamp. This sorting method prioritizes the oldest and most important tickets.

However, if you use SLAs, ticket priority and age might not be the most important metrics to use for ordering tickets within your queues.

Ordering tickets by time to SLA breach

Ordering tickets by time to SLA breach brings your routing logic into alignment with your service commitments and can improve your ability to meet those goals.

Consider the following when ordering tickets based on SLA targets:

• The method of ticket ordering you use determines the order of tickets within any given queue, but doesn't influence the priority of ticket assignment across queues. If an agent can receive work from multiple queues, tickets from the queue with the higher priority are assigned to the agent before tickets from the lower priority queue. This is true regardless of how soon tickets in the lower priority queue will breach their SLA targets. Take this into consideration when creating and ordering custom queues.
• When ordering tickets based on the time to their next SLA breach, the setting is applied only to new and reopened tickets. Tickets already in the queue when this setting is turned on remain ordered by priority and timestamp as they were before.
• Ticket ordering is based on the SLA targets as they existed when the ticket entered the queue. If SLA policies are modified before the ticket is routed to an agent, the old SLA targets are still used for the purposes of routing.
• When ordering tickets based on the time to their next SLA breach, all tickets with SLA targets are ordered ahead of tickets without SLA targets, regardless of ticket priority and timestamp. Tickets without SLA targets are ordered based on their priority and routing eligibility timestamp.

If you want to order tickets based on SLA targets, update your omnichannel routing configuration to prioritize tickets with service level agreements.

Putting it together: Ordering tickets by priority and timestamp in a queue

The standard configuration orders and assigns tickets based on the ticket's priority and routing eligibility time. Let's walk through a ticket's life cycle with the standard omnichannel routing configuration:

1. On January 1, 2024, a customer sends an email, and a ticket is created at 08:30.
2. The creation of the ticket causes the triggers to run and then omnichannel routing to evaluate queues for the ticket.
   1. When the triggers fire, the auto-routing tag is added and the ticket is assigned to Group 1. These ticket updates occur one minute after the ticket was created. (08:31)

      The initial eligible for routing timestamp is 2024:01:01:08:31.

   2. Omnichannel routing recognizes the ticket as eligible for routing and adds it to the queue using the ticket's initial eligible for routing timestamp to determine its order.
      • If all tickets in the queue have the same priority, tickets with timestamps before 2024:01:01:08:31 will be ahead of this ticket in the queue, and those with timestamps after that will be behind it.
      • If not all tickets have the same priority, tickets with the highest priority are all added to the front of the queue in timestamp order, followed by tickets with the next highest priority in timestamp order, and so on.
3. When the ticket reaches the front of the queue, omnichannel routing looks for an agent in Group 1 that is available and has spare capacity. It finds an agent at 08:37 and assigns the ticket to them.

   The ticket becomes ineligible for routing as soon as it's assigned to the agent. The ticket's routing ineligibility time begins at 2024:01:01:08:37.

4. After three days of working on the ticket, at noon (12:00) on January 4, 2024, the agent reassigns the ticket to Group 2.

   The ticket becomes eligible for routing again because the new group assignment removes the previous agent assigned to the ticket. Because the ticket's routing ineligibility time was less than 15 days, it re-enters the queue and is ordered based on its initial eligible for routing timestamp (2024:01:01:08:31).

   Assuming equal priority, this ticket is inserted ahead of all tickets that became eligible for routing after this ticket was initially added to the queue.

5. Omnichannel routing assigns the ticket to an agent in Group 2 a few minutes after it's added to the queue.
6. After 20 days of being assigned to the agent in Group 2, the agent decides to reassign it to another group to which they don't belong. (Timestamp: 2024:01:24:10:45)

   Because the ticket's routing ineligibility time exceeded 15 days, the ticket is placed in the queue based on its priority and latest subsequent eligible for routing timestamp of 2024:01:24:10:45. Tickets of equal or greater priority that became eligible for routing prior to January 24, 2024, at 10:45 am and haven't had an ineligibility period of 15 days are ahead of this ticket in the queue.

7. When the ticket reaches the front of the queue, omnichannel routing assigns it to another agent. This agent works on the ticket and changes the status to Solved.