How can I prevent omnichannel routing from routing chat and messaging tickets?

Question

I'm using omnichannel routing (OCR), but I don't want to route chat and messaging tickets. How can I avoid routing those tickets?

Answer

Preventing all chat and messaging tickets from being routed

If you don't want to route chat and messaging tickets at all, choose one of these methods:

Create capacity rules that set the Messaging capacity to 0 for all agents

Create a unified agent that sets agents to Offline for messaging tickets

Then, create a view or another process for tracking and resolving the messaging and live chat tickets you excluded from omnichannel routing.

Preventing some tickets from being routed

If you want omnichannel routing to route some chat or messaging tickets but not all of them, configure a capacity greater than 0 for the channel. Then, follow one of these options:

On Professional plans and above

Use skills to control which messaging and chat tickets omnichannel routing routes. With this approach, messaging tickets will still enter the omnichannel routing queue, but those with a required skill that no agent has can't be assigned by omnichannel routing.

Turn on skill-based routing in your omnichannel routing configuration

Create a skill but don't assign it to any agents

Create one or more triggers

Add Conditions to define the tickets you don't want omnichannel routing to assign to agents.

Under Actions, configure the Ticket > Add skills or Ticket > Set skills actions to assign the skill that isn't assigned to any agents. Make sure to mark the skill as Required so that it isn't affected by the skills timeout.

Create a view or some other process for tracking and resolving the messaging and live chat tickets that you excluded from omnichannel routing

On all plans

Use groups with no agents to prevent omnichannel routing from assigning tickets. With the standard routing queue, omnichannel routing can assign tickets only to an agent in the group specified in the ticket's Group field. If the group contains no agents, tickets assigned to this group remain in the queue and won't be assigned by omnichannel routing.

Note: You can also prevent messaging tickets from being routed by using the trigger action Set routing channel to change the routing channel from messaging to email. This causes the ticket to be routed as an email and counted toward the agent’s email capacity. This can be useful if you want to treat messaging tickets differently in routing without relying solely on group configurations.

Create a group but don't add any agents to it

Create one or more triggers

Add Conditions to define the tickets you don't want omnichannel routing to assign to agents

Under Actions, configure the Ticket > Group action to assign the group without any agents

Create a view or some other process for tracking and resolving the messaging and live chat tickets that you excluded from omnichannel routing