Streamlined omnichannel & skill routing in Zendesk

Email, phone, WhatsApp, Instagram, help center, SMS — many channels, different teams, multiple languages. For our client, we built unified omnichannel routing with skill assignment in Zendesk—the result: clear ownership, more reliable SLAs, and significantly less administrative effort.

Starting point

Silos, many views, shifting priorities: Service was organized across numerous views and inboxes. Teams pulled tickets manually from hundreds of queues. That led to cherry-picking, uneven response times, and recurring SLA breaches — especially during peaks or country-specific processes. Team leads had to re-prioritize and redistribute daily.

Goals

• Unify omnichannel routing: Treat every inquiry the same, regardless of channel — with higher urgency for voice/live messaging.

• Introduce skill-based routing: Assign by topic, language, and brand (e.g., French, payment_issue, brand_a).

• Push over pull: Distribute fairly and automatically; one core view per role is enough.

• SLA adherence & escalations: Prioritize by remaining SLA time, automate escalations, and balance workload across teams.

Solution & architecture

Unify channels

All channels feed into a single prioritized queue. Voice and chat get a built-in urgency boost. Forms and help-center flows provide structured fields for pre-qualification.

Define skills & auto-enrich

We set up a skill set per language, topic, and brand. Triggers enrich tickets using form fields, topic tags, and context data, so only the right teams see the relevant tickets.
Examples: de, en, fr, payment_issue, returns, brand_a, brand_b.

Push instead of pull

Instead of picking tickets manually, people receive matching cases directly. Status and capacity govern fair distribution. A single core view per role is enough — hundreds of views disappear.

SLA logic & escalations

SLA timers, warning thresholds, and escalation paths ensure critical cases surface in time — or temporarily move to another team when one area is overloaded. Stricter thresholds apply to voice/live messaging.

Results

• One core view per role instead of fragmented inboxes — a clearer day plan.

• Stabilized SLA compliance, with critical cases proactively routed forward.

• Shorter first-response times thanks to push distribution and prioritization.

• Fewer escalations because tickets land with the right teams from the start.

• Higher first-contact resolution on standardized topics through clear skill assignment.
   

Ready to make omnichannel & skill-based routing work — fast?

We’ll help you design pragmatic routing rules, stabilize SLAs, and noticeably reduce admin load. Let’s talk.