Announcing ability to prioritize an agent's skills in omnichannel routing

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
November 19, 2025 | November 19, 2025 | December 8, 2025

Zendesk is excited to announce the release of agent skill prioritization, which is a powerful new feature that is designed to optimize ticket assignment to agents based on the priority of their skills.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

In addition to configuring a ticket's skill priority, which determines if and when they timeout during routing, you can now set priority levels for each of an agent's skills. When an agent's skill priority is set, omnichannel routing tries to assign tickets that match an agent's high-priority skills first. Agents with high-priority skills receive other tickets only when there are no tickets in the queue with their high-priority skills.

Agent skill priorities ensure that agents with high-priority skills receive tickets best suited to their expertise rather than taking up their capacity with any tickets they are eligible to receive. For example, if only one of your agents speaks Polish and English, while many others speak English, you could set the agent's Polish skill to a high priority. That would cause omnichannel routing to prioritize routing Polish-related tickets to the agent over tickets related to English only.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Zendesk understands that many customers operate large support teams with diverse skill sets. Often, agents possess rare and specialized skills that are critical to solving certain tickets, such as multi-lingual support, but those agents often end up handling tickets that other agents can easily solve. By introducing agent skill prioritization, you can use omnichannel routing to better capitalize on your agent's unique skills, increase efficiency, and reduce wait times for complex or specialized inquiries.

What do I need to do?

This feature is being rolled out to all accounts with omnichannel routing. To get started, create new skills or edit existing skills to configure the priority of agents' skills.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.