Announcing the option to route messaging conversations as email tickets with omnichannel routing

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
March 11, 2025 | March 11, 2025 | April 7, 2025

Zendesk is pleased to announce the a new routing configuration setting that causes omnichannel routing to treat messaging conversations as email tickets after an agent ends the messaging session.

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 September 2024, Zendesk released a messaging setting that allows agents to end messaging sessions. Ending a session releases their messaging capacity, freeing them up to receive another messaging ticket. However, omnichannel routing couldn't route the tickets associated with agent-ended messaging sessions.

This release adds a setting, named Route all agent-ended messaging sessions as email, to the omnichannel routing configuration. This setting makes it possible for omnichannel routing to route tickets associated with agent-ended messaging sessions by treating them as email tickets. By default, these tickets are assigned to the agent who ended the messaging session and are then counted toward the agent's email capacity. However, if the agent reassigns the ticket to a group, assuming the ticket has the auto-routing tag, it is then re-routed as if it were an email ticket.

When the Route all agent-ended messaging sessions as email option is selected in your omnichannel routing configuration, the ticket's channel (via type) remains unchanged and it still appear as messaging tickets in the Agent Workspace. Any correspondence after the messaging session is ended occurs over email. The only indicator that this setting has been applied to a ticket is in the ticket's event history.

In addition to the new setting, there's also a new queue condition for the routing channel, which makes it possible to define queues specifically based on how they're being treated by omnichannel routing, such as  agent-ended messaging sessions being treated as email tickets.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

The features in this release work together with the end messaging session option, to provide a seamless follow-up process for live conversations that move from messaging to email. Together these settings can improve your average handling time, agent efficiency, and the overall experience for your agents and end users alike.

What do I need to do?

This feature is being rolled out to all accounts with omnichannel routing. To start using it, you must allow agents to end messaging sessions and then update your omnichannel routing configuration to select Route all agent-ended messaging sessions as email. Optionally, you can also create or update omnichannel routing queues to use the Routing channel condition.