My agent automatically gets assigned more tickets than their capacity allows

Issue symptoms

When my agent goes online, they automatically receive more tickets than their capacity allows. For instance, omnichannel routing is on my account with capacity rules. My agent, with a capacity of two tickets, receives three tickets.

Resolution steps

Causes

By default, Zendesk doesn't count inactive messaging tickets toward the capacity limit. Omnichannel routing assigns tickets to available agents. When no end-user reply appears after 10 minutes, messaging tickets become inactive and no longer count toward the limit.

This behavior can also occur if the agent manually takes tickets from a view or if an agent manually assigns a ticket to that user.

If you don't use messaging activity routing to count inactive messaging tickets toward agent capacity, these scenarios exceed agent capacity:

The agent had inactive messaging tickets that became active again

All agents were unavailable for a period, such as non-business hours, but messaging tickets appeared and became inactive. The first agent to become available received those inactive tickets, and then those tickets became active again.

Solutions

To ensure inactive conversations count toward agent capacity, select Count inactive conversations towards an agent's capacity in your routing configuration. That way, inactive messaging conversations count the same as active messaging conversations.

Messaging uses user presence to identify if end users are still on the website or have abandoned the conversation by closing the website. User presence increases agent utilization by actively releasing capacity when an end user abandons the session, helping prevent abandoned tickets from keeping agents at maximum capacity.

Note: The Set routing channel trigger action changes the routing of a messaging ticket to email. This causes the ticket to count as an email by omnichannel routing, toward the email capacity instead of messaging. This option gives you more flexibility in how inactive or messaging-heavy workloads count.

If you don't select this option and you don't offer 24-hour support, your account can accumulate inactive messaging tickets. This happens specifically if the Web Widget allows transfers to agents at any time. Instead, create a schedule and add the business hours condition step in your conversation flow. This condition limits the creation of messaging tickets according to your schedule.

Note: If you created custom omnichannel queues, you can create a dashboard that shows live data for your routing.

For more information, see Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads.