Troubleshooting omnichannel routing issues

If you have problems with your omnichannel routing setup, use this guide to find solutions to common issues.

This article covers the following topics:

Review Copilot recommendations

Omnichannel routing settings not visible in Admin Center

Abandoned call tickets

Agents get more tickets than their capacity limits

Voice tickets don't route to the right groups

Messaging tickets don't route correctly

Unavailable settings and functions

Expected behaviors

Review Copilot recommendations

If you have the Copilot add-on, review artificial intelligence (AI) recommendations about your omnichannel routing settings. Copilot flags routing issues and provides systemic recommendations to optimize your operations. For more details, see Optimizing your account with admin copilot insights and recommendations.

Omnichannel routing settings not visible in Admin Center

If settings for omnichannel routing don't appear in Admin Center, check whether you meet the requirements.

Abandoned call tickets

Abandoned call tickets might appear in your queue with omnichannel routing on. This happens because omnichannel routing creates tickets for calls but doesn't support the Create tickets for abandoned calls setting. For a workaround, see Automatically closing tickets created by abandoned calls.

Skills routing doesn't assign to tickets with omnichannel routing

If skills routing doesn't work, you're likely not using triggers or your trigger conditions aren't set correctly.

To ensure skills routing works:

Verify that the skill applies to your tickets

Use triggers to assign skills to tickets because they can add skills when tickets are updated as well as when tickets are created

The skills actions for ticket triggers also let you specify the skill priority for routing

Skills marked as Required can't time out and are part of the criteria for routing the ticket to an agent, but optional skills stop being considered for routing when a skills timeout occurs

Trigger actions related to skills are available when you've created at least one skill

Agents get more tickets than their capacity limits

Agents may receive more tickets than their allowed capacity. For more information about why this happens, see My agent automatically gets assigned more tickets than their capacity allows.

Voice tickets don't route to the right groups

When omnichannel routing is off, Voice (formerly Talk) creates tickets after an agent accepts a call. When it's on, the system creates tickets immediately and routes them to available agents before they accept the call. Triggers that run on these Voice tickets can affect routing. Update triggers to exclude Voice channel tickets. Use this condition in your trigger: Ticket > Channel | Is not | Phone call (incoming).

If you use generative AI to transcribe and summarize your calls and also have intelligent triage on, sentiment detection may assign an intent value that routes the ticket based on a business rule. Check the events of the ticket to confirm this.

Messaging tickets don't route correctly

If you use custom omnichannel routing queues, messaging tickets route automatically.

If you use the standard omnichannel routing queue, you must assign tickets to a group before they're eligible for omnichannel routing. Adjust or create triggers to assign groups to messaging tickets. For more information, see Requirements for the routing trigger.

A trigger action called Set routing channel lets you change a messaging ticket's routing channel to email. When you change the routing channel from messaging to email, add the auto-routing tag to the ticket. Don't use only the Ticket > End session action in the trigger. This is incompatible with the Set routing channel action, which ends the session and changes the routing channel. After you change the routing channel and add the auto-routing tag, omnichannel routing treats tickets as email tickets and they count toward the agent's email capacity instead of messaging capacity. This manages queue eligibility and balances workloads across channels. For more information, see About ending messaging sessions.

Unavailable settings and functions

Omnichannel routing offers a unique experience, but some settings aren't available. Compare your missing settings to the known limitations in Requirements and limitations of omnichannel routing.

Note: Omnichannel routing is the default routing experience for all new and trial customers of Zendesk Suite created on or after December 11, 2024.

Tip: If you created custom omnichannel queues, set up a dashboard for live data on routing performance with this recipe Reporting on custom omnichannel queue performance.

Expected behaviors

Round robin treats offers as assignments. This results in an uneven distribution if agents don't accept.

If there's a large discrepancy among some agents, interview your agents to understand why they don't accept the offers they receive.

Tickets leave a custom queue after a ticket update if they no longer meet the queue conditions.

Ensure the conditions of the desired queue meet the ticket features for every expected subsequent ticket update. For example, remove condition Ticket is created.

Updates in the queue setup don't apply to tickets that are already in the queue.

Tickets follow the queue configuration at the time they joined it.

Omnichannel routing (OCR) offers newer tickets first if service level agreement (SLA) prioritization is active.

Ensure tickets have an active target at all times, deactivate SLA prioritization, or use custom queues. Custom queues priority takes precedence over SLAs. This lets older tickets join a higher priority queue based on the use case.

OCR only routes tickets without an assignee.

If a group contains only one agent, a system ticket rule assigns the ticket to that agent when the ticket lands in the group. Review the ticket events to confirm if this event took place immediately after ticket creation.

OCR routes tickets unevenly among agents due to higher priority skills.

Ensure an admin assigns the correct skills to all agents.

Brand memberships prevent assignments.

Ensure an admin assigns the correct brands to all agents.

OCR doesn't offer Voice and messaging tickets to secondary groups of a custom queue if an agent is available in the primary group but doesn't accept the ticket.

Agents must set themselves to Away or Offline whenever they aren't available to take tickets.

OCR doesn't assign reopened tickets to agents with Online status.

OCR reassigns reopened tickets based on the agent status of the current assignee. Ensure you select the agent status that the reopened ticket becomes unassigned from.