Best practices for setting up your account to get the most out of Agent Home

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Agent Home is an updated way for agents to find and manage work in Zendesk. This article describes some best practices that admins can use with Agent Home to provide the best experience for their agents. See Using Agent Home to learn more.

This article includes these sections:

Activate messaging

Enable omnichannel routing (OCR)

Configure service level agreement (SLA) policies

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Activate messaging

Zendesk recommends using Agent Home with messaging activated. Even if you haven’t tried messaging in your Zendesk account yet, there’s never been a better time to use messaging in tandem with Agent Home because it’s built to work well with real-time conversations. With Agent Home, messaging conversations where an agent has closed the ticket tab are updated and represented in real time, including the typing indicator and latest comment from the customer.

The Recommended sort option in Agent Home groups all an agent’s active conversations at the top of the work list, making sure they never miss a conversation with a customer. This single list of work makes it much easier for your agents to stay on top of active messaging conversations.

Enable omnichannel routing (OCR)

Agent Home shows all open tickets assigned to an agent (up to the 100 most recently updated). But, what if an agent wants to pick up new work from unassigned tickets? While navigating to Views and pulling work out of the shared inbox is one way to take on new work, the drawback is that agents can use views to cherry pick.

To prevent cherry picking, you can use Agent Home in conjunction with omnichannel routing, where agents are automatically assigned tickets based on their workload.

Historically, cherry picking prevention was managed by introducing Guided mode (Play button). See example below.

Agent Home with omnichannel routing solves a similar use case to Guided mode, along with additional benefits. Instead of being served tickets from views, omnichannel routing puts tickets straight into the agent’s queue and assigns the work directly to the agent based on their availability, capacity, and skillset.

Just as Guided mode includes a default “Your assigned tickets” view, agents can review all their follow-up and asynchronous conversations with customers directly from Agent Home. Also, Agent Home has the added benefit of a Recommended sort that takes into account live conversation status and prioritization by your organization’s SLAs.

Configure service level agreement (SLA) policies

You may prefer to sort and prioritize work by a number of important considerations, including:

The organization the requester originates from. This is especially popular for B2B use cases.

The VIP status of the requester.

The nature of the request. For example, questions about an in-flight ecommerce order status may be prioritized with more urgency than questions about after-sales warranties.

In such cases, agents have historically used custom fields to rank and prioritize this inbound work. While Agent Home doesn’t support configurable custom fields, instead, you can configure SLA policies to prioritize work by urgency. Take a look at the best practices for implementing SLA policies and don’t forget that Reply Time SLAs are now supported for messaging. This will help your agents prioritize messaging conversations down to the minute!

Best practices for setting up SLAs

Introducing Messaging SLA Enhancements

All of Zendesk’s SLA Resources, in one place

By taking a deep dive on your workflows, priorities, and policies, you can create an SLA workflow that minimizes the overhead for individual agents to manually prioritize. Instead, let Zendesk SLAs do all the heavy lifting to get the right work to agents faster.