About unified agent statuses

Team, Professional, or Enterprise







Verified AI summary ◀▼
Unified agent statuses let you manage your availability for email, voice, and messaging from one menu. You can set your status to online, away, transfer only, or offline, which affects how tickets are routed. Admins can create custom statuses on higher plans. Be aware of limitations like operating hours not affecting status and the need for Agent Workspace activation.






Location: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Omnichannel routing > Agent statuses


Unified agent statuses are part of omnichannel routing and provide a way for agents to control
availability for email, voice, and messaging from a single menu. In addition to the
standard unified agent statuses available on all plans, admins on Professional plans and
above can also define custom unified agent statuses to suit their workflows.
Unified agent statuses are automatically available to accounts that meet the requirements.
This article contains the following topics:
About the standard unified agent statuses
Considerations for unified agent status
Related articles




About the standard unified agent statuses

Unified agent statuses are used to inform omnichannel routing behavior for
tickets from email (including web form, side conversations,
and API), calls, messaging conversations, and sometimes Chat. Agents set their unified status manually
and need to adjust it throughout the day to accurately reflect their availability to
receive work. These standard statuses are the basis for custom agent statuses,
too.
There are four standard agent statuses:

Online - Tickets from email, calls, messaging conversations, and sometimes Chat can be routed to the
agent.
Away - Only email tickets can be routed to the agent.
Transfer only - Only tickets that have already been reviewed and need
to be transferred to the agent can be routed to them.
Offline - No tickets can be routed to the agent.



Modifying an agent's status

In most situations, an agent's status is set manually by the agents
themselves. They are encouraged to change their status to offline before any
breaks. However, when one of the following disconnection events is detected, an
agent is automatically set to offline:

An agent closes the Agent Workspace without signing out (by
closing their browser window, shutting down their computer, or putting their
computer in sleep mode)
An agent’s connection is lost due to a network outage

Additionally, admins can configure the account to automatically adjust an agent's
status to offline or away when they are idle for longer than the
idle timeout
threshold.
Note: Account-level inactivity session time-out
settings don't affect agents' unified statuses.






Considerations for unified agent status

Consider the following information before enabling and using omnichannel routing and
unified agent status.


Requirements

Your account must meet the following requirements to use unified agent status and
omnichannel routing:
The Agent Workspace must be
activated for your account.
If your account has a Chat subscription, native messaging or Sunshine
Conversations must also be activated.
Limited support for Chat is provided for accounts migrating to Messaging and
omnichannel routing.





Limitations

The following limitations currently exist for unified agent status in
omnichannel routing:

Operating hours won't set an agent's status.
After you turn on omnichannel routing, you can no longer set agent
status for voice support from the Talk dashboard, mobile apps, or Talk APIs.
Integrations that use Talk APIs to change agent statuses might also be
impacted.
After you turn on omnichannel routing, Chat availability statuses aren't
supported.
If call forwarding is enabled and the status of an agent is
automatically set to offline because the agent has been disconnected, calls
to the agent will no longer be forwarded to the agent's phone.
When omnichannel routing is activated, agents are automatically set to
offline across all channels. When this happens, they are prompted to set a
new status. Ongoing live conversations aren't interrupted, but calls waiting
in the queue will be directed to voicemail.
Based on your plan, there are limits to the number of custom agent
statuses you can create:
Team and Growth: You cannot create custom statuses
Professional: 5 custom statuses
Enterprise: 100 custom statuses


Agents working on tickets won't see changes to status timeout rules until they
refresh the page.




Using unified agent statuses with Zendesk Workforce Management

Unified agent statuses data can be synchronized with Zendesk Workforce Management
(WFM). When this is configured, WFM calculates adherence and activities based on
unified agent statuses rather than general tasks. Admins can map unified agent
statuses to workstreams. Synchronizing unified agent status data with WFM also
allows agents to set their status once, in the Agent Workspace, rather than
needing to maintain it in two systems. For more information, see Turning on unified agent status
synchronization for Zendesk WFM.




Related articles

See the following articles for more information to help you get up and
running with unified agent statuses:

Creating custom unified agent
statuses
Managing unified agent statuses
About omnichannel routing with unified agent
status




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