Workflow: Using queues in omnichannel routing to overflow calls to other groups


In some cases, you might want to route calls to certain agents, but need to have the routing logic to "overflow" to alternative agents if none of the preferred agents are available. Omnichannel routing queues are designed to provide more granular routing logic and consistent ways to route work to multiple groups of agents.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support with

Talk Professional or Enterprise










This article assumes omnichannel routing has been turned on for
your account. See Turning on omnichannel routing and Managing your omnichannel routing configuration.
In some cases, you might want to route calls to certain agents, but need to have the
routing logic to "overflow" to alternative agents if none of the preferred agents are
available. Omnichannel routing queues are designed to provide more granular routing
logic and consistent ways to route work to multiple groups of agents.
This recipe uses omnichannel routing, groups, and custom queues.
This example includes:
Workflow goal
Creating groups of agents to handle different types of insurance inquiries
Defining the queues




Workflow goal

Your company uses separate phone lines for each type of insurance they offer, such as
a dedicated line for health insurance inquiries. They want to route all calls
received on the health insurance phone number to the Health Insurance Division
group of agents, but use the General Insurance Division group of agents as backup
when the health insurance division agents aren't available. Now that omnichannel
routing supports the creation of custom queues and routing work to both primary and
secondary groups of agents, you've been tasked with updating your omnichannel
routing settings to accomplish this.


Using omnichannel routing for calls

Before deciding how to route calls, it's important to understand the ticket
creation process. When you use omnichannel routing, a ticket is
created for the call as soon as it is received. That means you can run triggers
on incoming calls before it is answered. If you choose not to use omnichannel
routing, tickets are created for calls after the call is answered by an agent,
and triggers can't be run against the incoming calls until the ticket is
created. That means omnichannel routing is the only way you can use triggers to
influence call routing.
When using custom queues, triggers fire on new calls before omnichannel routing
evaluates the queues.
See How omnichannel routing works.




Creating groups of agents to handle different types of insurance inquiries

Groups collect agents together, allowing
admins to manage agent ticket assignments based on an agent's skills, experience, or
other similarities.

To create the groups
In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Groups.
Click Add group.
Enter a group name. In this example, we'll use Health Insurance
Division.
Select the agents you want to add to the group.
Click Save.
Repeat steps 2–5 to create another group named General Insurance
Division.
Create a process, such as a trigger, to assign calls from the
health insurance phone number to the new group.





Defining the queues

Tickets, including calls, are assigned to queues based on the queue's conditions.
Conditions are the qualifications needed for a ticket to be added to the queue.

Tip: If you use IVR, you can create queue conditions based on the tags added
by IVR. See Using IVR with omnichannel routing.

To define the queues
In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing >
Queues.
Click Create queue.
Enter a Name for the queue. For this example, we'll use: Health
insurance requests.
Specify the queue's Priority relative to other queues. Queue
priority is only considered when an agent receives work from multiple
queues. In that case, work from the queue with the higher priority is
assigned first. You can use the same priority value for more than one
queue.

Under Conditions, specify the conditions under which you want the
skill to be added. For example:

Ticket > Channel > Is > Phone call
(incoming)


Ticket > Comment text > Contains at least one of the
following words > Call to: +1 888 8888



For Primary group, select Health Insurance Division.
For Secondary groups, select General Insurance Division.
Click Save.
On the Queues page, drag and drop the queues into your preferred
order. Omnichannel routing evaluates the queues in the order they are
listed on the Queues page and inserts tickets into the first queue they
match the conditions for.



When you use the configurations described in this article, calls received on the
health insurance line (+1 888 8888) are inserted into the Health insurance requests
queue based on the call's priority and ticket creation timestamp. Then, the call is
routed to an available agent in the Health Insurance Division group. If all agents
in the Health Insurance Division group are unavailable, the call overflows to the
secondary group (General Insurance Division) for a faster response.


{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6831121209498",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6831121209498",
"headline": "Workflow: Using queues in omnichannel routing to overflow calls to other groups",
"description": "You can configure omnichannel routing to overflow calls from a primary group of agents to a secondary group by creating custom queues and defining routing conditions based on call attributes and agent availability.",
"articleSection": "Workflow best practices and recipes",
"datePublished": "2024-03-01T21:58:40+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-06-08T16:15:44.809761+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6831121209498"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com",
"softwareAddOn": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Talk",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/4405298861722"
}
}
}
