Round Robin assignment

Hi All, 

The plan is still to beta release omnichannel routing in August - stay tuned!

Barry

@barry14 - Will an announcement be made when the beta is ready so we can apply for the beta program?

Hi All, we now have beta released omnichannel routing. To qualify :

1. You must have agent workspace enabled

2. If you have a chat subscription, you must have messaging enabled and be 100% messaging, i.e. no chat traffic.

If you qualify, you should see an omnichannel routing section appear within your admin centre

Barry

So this is a joke right?

If I decide not to use your messaging platform and work with one of your preferred partner such as Ada using their chatbot I can't benefit from the omnichannel routing?

Seems a little short sighted that you're excluding customers that have chosen to work with your partners.

I second what @nathan11 said - this feels like a joke.

After all this time, and really good feedback from your customers on this valuable topic for almost all customer service teams out there, specifically those handling more than 10 mails /day, you really feel that this is an appropriate Update in this thread?

@barry14 can you confirm wether or not this function is usable for an account like us, currently no chat set up (on Enterprise Plan though) and we need this only for ticket assignments. 

@retourenstation: If you dont have any chat traffic, then you can use the omnichannel routing engine to assign support tickets. It should be on in your admin centre.

Any timeline on when this will be available to accounts who use Live Chat? Messaging is a complete no go due to the current lack of any kind of banning and inability to control translations. 

@barry14 chat traffic and having messaging enabled are two different things.

Our chosen bot (ADA) requires code to be embedded into our guide header; to avoid conflicts, all other bots need to be disabled. Using this product was a substantial investment, recommended by one of your partner organizations, as Zendesk's chat features (including messaging) are too rudimentary to support our business needs.

I would like you to confirm that omnichannel routing can be used with third-party chat software that Zendesk advertises in their marketplace without needing to have messaging enabled.

If you can not confirm this, please have one of your engineers test it to verify.

If this will not work, your team needs to take this back to development and design a solution that works for all customers instead of requiring them to use a product/features (like messaging) that doesn't meet their business needs.

Hi CJ - no firm yet as to when/if this will be extended to accounts that use Live Chat.

@barry14 That's really unfortunate to find out now that it's not even certain that this will ever be available for Live Chat, after being told for years, before Messaging was even a product, that we could expect this feature in the future. 

It would have been nice to mention that this was a limitation to the implementation that was being built sooner, as it's clear from the thread there's a lot of interest from people on accounts that do not use Messaging. Currently, Messaging lacks any features to protect agents from third party harassment, it's not like we're being stubborn and refusing change products for no reason, it's lacking a critical, required element to protect agents from repeated harassment. 

Should we be opening a new thread to request that this be a feature for accounts that use Live Chat? How can we as customers voice that we really would like Round Robin assignment available to accounts using Live Chat? 

Hi CJ, thanks for your feedback. Enabling routing for messaging and chat is something that is under consideration and certainly your views and the views of the others on this thread are being taken into account. I will hope to confirm soon what the decision is.

Barry

Hi @nathan11, the traffic from your chat bot that flows into zendesk is treated as chat traffic and hence cannot currently be routed by the omnichannel routing engine. However your strong view and the view of others is being considered in whether we should extend the routing engine to work with both chat and messaging channels. I will revert asap on this

Barry

Adding my two cents ...

The fact that Zendesk is making the routing engine only available to instances that are using Messaging is really disappointing. 

We started looking at Live Chat last year, only to find it didn't fit our needs and is probably going to be deprecated soon in favor of Messaging. So we tried Messaging, only to find out it lacks a number of features it'd need to even consider implementing it for our customers. After talking more with our customers, we found that they don't even WANT chat/messaging - so we have no need for it and wouldn't be implementing it anyway. 

Now, we're trying to solve the problem of having to take the time of Technical Support Engineers to route tickets this way or that, to one teammate or the other, or take the ticket themselves. This takes time away from the work they should be doing, which is working to resolve those tickets. We hoped that through use of the new routing engine we'd finally be able to Round-Robin assign tickets to team members, removing the hassle and time suck of needing to have someone always watching the queue and assigning out tickets. 

But ... it's only available to customers using Messaging. That is disappointing indeed. 

Hoping for a change!

I know this was planned for development late 2021 based on Nicole's update.  Do we have any updates on when this functionality might be released?  

Hi, as Dave mentioned above we have now released omnichannel routing! You must be on Agent Workspace and, if you have a chat subscription, be using Messaging rather than Live Chat.

If you fulfill these criteria, you should see the Omnichannel Routing configuration in your Admin Center.

Barry

Was this ever rolled out? 

@dave12 @barry14 Any updates on whether you will ever roll this out to accounts *not* using Messaging? 

Hi, Omnichannel Routing has been rolled out, but you must be on Agent Workspace and, if you have a chat subscription, be using Messaging rather than Live Chat.

@barry14 Not trying to be a jerk, but I am trying to follow up on your message from September 1st that you would look into whether Live Chat would be included in the future: 

Are you able yet to confirm what that decision was? 

Hi, any news on this feature?

Hi, extending omnichannel routing to allow mixed mode customers, i.e. customers using chat and messaging is on the roadmap for 2023 

Barry

Does anyone here already have some experience with this feature for support tickets? We are on an Enterprise Plan, but do not have chat activated yet. We use the Web Widget Classic just for customers to be able to search for question directly on the website. Does this mean we won't be able to use the feature, because we do not have messagin active? I am a little confused here to be honest.

Would love to start using the round-robin-assignment feature before Black Friday for tickets only. Just wondering if it's worth trying to set that up/working for anyone properly for tickets only? 

Hi @retourenstation

You should be able to see omnichannel routing in your admin centre?

If you can , you can use it for tickets only - help guide here

Barry

Even with Omnichannel routing, it still doesn't Round Robin assign tickets. Truly, the logic behind the routing is still a bit of a mystery as there are no settings other than "if it has x tag, then route it" and capacity settings. 

It still will give one agent 7 tickets, the other 2 when they have the same number of OPEN tickets in each of their assigned queues. Very strange. 

ZD needs to continue to enhance this to allow for configurable logic.