Announcing routing based on agents' percentage-based capacity with omnichannel routing

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
May 29, 2025 | May 29, 2025 | June 5, 2025

Zendesk is excited to announce that omnichannel routing can now route tickets to agents based on the percentage of their spare capacity for the channel.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

A new assignment method option is being added to omnichannel routing: highest percentage spare capacity. When this assignment method is selected, omnichannel routing judges each agent's spare capacity as a percentage of their total capacity rather than the numerical difference between their maximum capacity and used capacity. The result is that the agent with the lowest percentage of their capacity consumed is deemed to have the highest spare capacity and is therefore assigned or offered work first.

The following example demonstrates the difference between the current behavior (highest numerical spare capacity) and the new percentage-based option:

Agent A has 1 ticket assigned to them and a maximum capacity of 2 for the channel.

Numerically, Agent A has a spare capacity of 1.

As a percentage, Agent A has a spare capacity of 50%.

Agent B has 8 tickets assigned to them and a maximum capacity of 10 for the channel.

Numerically, Agent B has a spare capacity of 2.

As a percentage, Agent B has a spare capacity of 20%.

In this scenario, omnichannel routing would assign the next ticket to Agent B if using the default, highest numerical spare capacity method (2 is greater than 1). However, when using the highest percentage spare capacity method, omnichannel routing would assign the next ticket to Agent A because a higher percentage of her maximum capacity is currently unused (50% is greater than 20%).

For more information, see Managing your omnichannel routing configuration's assignment method.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Zendesk listened to feedback from our customers that assigning tickets based on numeric spare capacity wasn't always the fairest way to distribute work to agents. In some instances, this felt like punishing the highest-performing agents who have the highest capacity, and led them to feel overwhelmed and burned out. Using percentages of spare capacity provides a fairer distribution of work because the comparison normalizes all agent capacities as a fraction of 100.

What do I need to do?

The new percentage-based assignment method will be available to all omnichannel routing customers. To begin using this, update the assignment method in your routing configuration.