Omnichannel Routing in Zendesk
Putting Zendesk to Work is Support Driven’s advice column about getting the most out of Zendesk. Get insights and answers from our community of Zendesk administrators and consultants.
Join our Zendesk community and we'll help you put Zendesk to work.
Using Omnichannel Routing beta
Anybody using the Omnichannel Routing beta yet? Curious how it’s working for people in curbing cherry picking: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409149119514
- Zendesk Manager
Heather Rommel, Zendesk and Jira expert: No because it relies on the Agents to set their availability and you can't automate it - like they miss 2 and set them auto to not available
Zendesk Manager: The manual availability setting isn’t too much of a dealbreaker for me—I’m already relying on agents to set their availability for phones. Hear you on the “miss two and switch to unavailable” though. I’m not totally sure how that would work with the email routing side of things, but we leaned on that pretty heavily for phone routing.
Playlist app for routing tickets
Hi all! It looks like some of you have implemented Playlist. For those of you that have, do you feel like it is worth the cost? Have you seen major efficiency gains since implementing? And do you feel like it solves several issues that an OOTB solution from Zendesk cannot provide? Any and all insight would be greatly appreciated!
- Zendesk Improver
Community Member A: I've implemented it at two companies now and find it works well for solving the following problems: eliminates "cherry-picking", improves SLA breaches because team members are not taking tickets out of order, and decreases full time to resolution. I have not seen as strong of an impact on response times. I would recommend though. The founder, Au Finh, is great to work with.
Community Member B: I have a client who is using it. I haven't seen a real advantage, but I would love to hear others' opinions, so I am watching this thread.
Heather Rommel, Zendesk and Jira expert: We're about to get it, but we're not convinced it will do what we want because Agents have to press the button which is essentially enforcing what we want them to do which is go from top to bottom on their queue. We don't have an appetite for auto-routing to people because keeping their status up to date is not going to be a thing and also we don't want to hide views because that's sort of punitive.
Report on Solved ticket by Role
I would like to do a report on Solved ticket by Role. But the "Assignee role" value doesn't contain all my roles I've created. Is this expected? Is there anyway to get that data?
- Explore Wizard
Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk: Unfortunately, there's not currently a way to filter or report on custom roles (see Can I filter Explore reports by custom agent roles?). There is a product feedback thread on this, so I'd recommend upvoting and adding your use case here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4650374350874I think any workaround would either be to use Groups that correspond to your custom roles as Spencer describes, or leveraging the API to look up the custom role for the agents solving tickets, and either building a report outside of Zendesk entirely, or perhaps running a script that looks for solved tickets, looking up the custom role of the agent who solves the ticket, and tagging the ticket to identify that so it could be used in Explore reporting.
Explore Wizard: I ended up creating a custom user field on the User profile that is filled in when the user is added to a team. Then use a webhook/trigger to update the ticket for reporting purposes.
Combining 4 companies into one instance of Zendesk
Has anyone undergone combining, essentially what is, 4 companies into one instance of Zendesk?
My question really is, is this something a team of internal “experts” can do or do you recommend reaching out to an external Zendesk team to get us up and running and we can manage it ourselves afterwards?
- Zendesk Administrator
Community Member A: There are probably a number of ways to do this, but for a previous client of mine I used different ticket forms per company with the first trigger checking the ticket form and adding company-specific tags for both future triggers/automation and reporting. The bigger question is how are you differentiating each company on ticket creation. For my client they were a call center so it could be done for phone number. For others I worked with they would send a create ticket API from their website or use a specific email alias that could be used to set the ticket form.
Zendesk Administrator: That’s a good question that is still to be determined based on other above us decisions made on our name moving forward.
Community Member B: We have three Brands set up. In a previous life I did support for about a dozen bikeshares, and each one had a separate Brand in Zendesk (again most/all agents handling all brands). We have Groups set up for each Brand, to ensure the right Agents see the right Brands & tiers, and then have Views that combine all three Brands; this allows the ticket that needs the most immediate attention floats to the top for everyone that can handle it, without having to check separate Views for each Brand.
Heather Rommel, Zendesk and Jira expert: I would say can do this yourself for sure, but it takes careful planning and setup. As the others mentioned, you can use Groups and/or Forms to help separate them, or you can go Brands (which separates your help centers - you might want that, you might not).
The other thing to consider is data migration.... that's a whole beast in itself!!
And another big thing is to look at how tickets are created on each of the instances now (email? form on guide? API? chat? etc) and think about channels up front
Getting your triggers set up correctly will be the biggest hurdle once your skeleton is in.... If you have enterprise, I highly suggest using the auto email archive setting and getting copies of all outgoing emails so you can start to monitor what the customer experience will be when they get emailed...2
I highly recommend using Dynamic Content if you need your emails to be the same but want different headers or something based on the "company"
Community Member C:
I echo everything that Heather Rommel said. Having consistent processes and naming conventions is important, and the hardest part is getting everything migrated over. One thing to consider is whether this is going to be 4>1 or 4>4 (ie: post-migration, will the four companies operate as one or 4 independent companies). There are definitely operational efficiencies to be gained by moving into one instance, but it's definitely a measure twice, cut once operation.
Coming up with a CAB process will also be important. Almost anything can be accomplished inside of Zendesk on your own with the support of the Zendesk Community (and Google), given enough time budget and resources. Companies like yours rely on a 3rd party implementation service most often when they don't have enough of one of those to accomplish their goals.
PS - The company I work for does this stuff on the regular, if you do decide to go that route, we'd be happy to assist further.
