Setting your agent status for Support, Messaging, and Talk with omnichannel routing

What's my plan?

All Suites | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Support | Team, Professional, or Enterprise

Tip: If you're not using omnichannel routing, see Setting your Talk agent status and Setting your conversation status.

When omnichannel routing is enabled for your account, agents working in the Zendesk Agent Workspace can set a single, unified status across multiple Zendesk channels (Support, Messaging, and Talk). The status set by the agent determines when and what type of tickets from these channels can be routed to them with omnichannel routing.

Light agents can't use unified agent statuses.

This article contains the following topics:

About unified agent statuses

Setting your status

About unified agent statuses

Unified agent statuses are used to inform routing behavior for tickets from Support, Messaging, and Talk. There are four standard unified statuses for agents:

Online - Tickets from Talk, Messaging, and Support can be routed to the agent.

Away - Only Support tickets can be routed to the agent.

Transfer only - Only tickets that have already been reviewed and need to be transferred to the agent can be routed to them.

Offline - No tickets can be routed to the agent.

On Professional and Enterprise plans, admins can create additional custom unified statuses for agents to use. When an admin creates custom statuses, they define one of the default statuses for each channel that will be applied when an agent uses the custom status. For example, if an admin creates a new status called “In meeting”, they probably don't want the most time-sensitive channels of work routed to agents with this status. In that case, they could set Email (Support) to online, and Messaging and Talk to away. That would result in agents with the “In meeting” status only receiving tickets generated from Support email.

Make sure you understand how to use any custom unified statuses that are available for you to use.

Setting your status

Agents set a single status in the Agent Workspace for Support, Messaging, and Talk. Before you start setting your agent status, consider the following:

When using unified agent statuses, chat operating hours won't automatically set your messaging status.

It's important that you set your status to offline before any periods of inactivity, such as signing off for the day. Your status is only inferred if one of the following events is detected:

An agent closes the Agent Workspace without signing out (by closing down their computer or browser window or putting their computer to sleep)

An agent’s connection is lost due to a network outage

An agent is idle for longer than the idle status threshold defined by admins

To set your status

In the ticket interface, click your profile icon in the top bar and select the status you want from the profile menu.