Zendesk provides admins with a lot of flexibility for routing tickets to agents and automating aspects of your ticket workflows, but deciding which tools to use and how to configure them to best meet your needs can be challenging. This article guides you through questions you can use to inform this decision and provides next steps.
Setting your routing and automation goals
Before you choose your routing options for tickets and customize your account, put together a list of key goals you want to achieve with the routing. These goals should reflect your company’s priorities and focus. Map out your desired outcome before you set up anything in Zendesk.
Before choosing your routing solution, it can be helpful to put together a list of key goals you want to achieve with your ticket routing. These goals should reflect your company's priorities and focus. Some topics to consider:
- How might your customers benefit from a specialized workflow? For example, would prioritizing support requests in your ticket queue for the fastest resolution be useful or is it better to route tickets to specific groups of agents?
- How can you route tickets to provide them with the best, quickest results?
- Do you have a problem with tickets remaining in the queue too long? How long is too long for each channel you use? Do you have SLAs that determine this?
- What attributes do you use to determine a ticket's priority? The ticket requester? Tags? Language? What business rules do you use to prioritize tickets? Does how and why you prioritize work vary across channels?
- What situation or issue experienced by your end users would make your team stop what they're doing and switch to solve that issue?
- How could you express those situations in business rule conditions to route those cases to the right agents?
- Review your triggers, groups, tags, and views. Which ones exist to segregate tickets to certain agents? Which ones are used to mark priority?
- How many tickets do you receive in an average day, week, or month? What's the ratio of tickets to agents per hour? How long, on average, does it take for an agent to solve a ticket? Does this vary by channel? Does this vary by shift?
- What sets your tickets apart from each other? Is there a lot of variation?
- In addition to your workflow within Zendesk, think of your workflow outside of Zendesk. Which tools and applications are the most important for managing your workflows? How can Zendesk enhance these flows.
- Do you want to track commonly-asked questions and prepare consistent, automated responses?
- How do you identify and monitor potentially-escalating problems?
- How many agents do you have?
- Are they all working roughly the same hours, or do they work in shifts? Does your ticket workflow vary depending on time of day or location?
- Do you want to measure and manage the time each agent works on a ticket?
- Review your groups and organizations. What criteria are you using to define group membership?
- (Professional plans and above) What attributes do your agents have that determine their suitability to work different tickets? Seniority, product knowledge, channel expertise, language, etc. These could be defined as skills.
- What is your agent workload? Do you have a problem with tickets remaining in the queue too long? How long is too long for each channel you use? Do you have SLAs that determine this?
- How is your team structured? Do you group agents or requests based on topic (such as billing or tech support), ticket severity, or customer status? Or do all tickets go into a single queue accessible to all agents?
- Talk to your team leads. Are there go-to and no-go people for certain topics? Skills or groups could address this.
- Are there people who are known to struggle with focusing on working tickets to completion before switching to new tasks? Would limiting the number of tickets they could be working on at a time, such as with capacity rules, be helpful?
- How will agents perceive capacity-based assignment of work versus round robin-based assignments? Will agents feel like it's punishing them for their efficiency by giving them more work? Will agents struggle to balance their workloads if you adopt a round robin assignment method, even if they perceive it as more fair?
- What reporting do you currently use? Would it be helpful to have more real-time data on agent availability and performance?
Deciding on your routing and automated ticket workflows
After considering your company's need and setting your routing goals, the next step is to decide which routing method you're going to use. There are several pre-defined routing methods as well as many other business rules and configuration options that can influence routing behavior and automate aspects of the ticket workflows. See Routing and automation options for incoming tickets.
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