Currently, if a customer leaves a voice message or abandons a call, Zendesk determines that the call has ended and removes it from the omnichannel routing queue. This means that voicemail and abandoned call tickets do not get auto assigned to agents and have to be manually monitored and manually assigned instead.
It would be much better if these tickets remained in the omnichannel routing queue and auto assigned to agents.
@oliver12 thank you for posting this! We just implemented Talk this week and I'm glad I saw your post.
Do we know if this applies to only Voicemails, or does this apply to all Talk tickets? For example, if an agent answers a call live, but then has to escalate the issue to a different team for further review. Will that ticket get routed properly? For some teams, phone calls are still >10% of ticket volume, so making sure those tickets route is important.
Hi @aaron11
An agent can forward/escalate a call to a different team using omnichannel routing
@barry14 Thanks for chiming in on this!
I tried to test this yesterday and I was unsuccessful at getting Omnichannel routing to pick it up. Here were my steps:
I've created an additional test today and, after 2.5 hours, the ticket has not been auto-assigned.
Looking through the community boards, I think this might be the issue. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/6253044513818-Omnichannel-Routing-Differenciate-Incoming-calls-from-Completed-calls
We intend to use WFM to strategically schedule and only have a handful of agents at any given time available to take calls, but those agents may have to forward the resulting tickets to other teams for follow-up or further research. Unless those agents are also available for incoming calls, they will never get the forwarded ticket auto-assigned.
I hope that makes sense!
Hi @aaron11
Yes, it makes sense and you are correct in that we currently dont automatically reassign voice mail tickets. Its on the roadmap to address….
Thank you for the confirmation/clarification!
@barry14 Are you able say what Q this update will implemented? And do you have any suggested workarounds for now?
@sean41 Hi Sean, just reaching out for an update on this thread.
Are you able say what Q this update will implemented? And do you have any suggested workarounds for now?
Hello.
+1 to Ollie's questions - when is the development expected and what are the current proposed workarounds?
+1 this would be very helpful for my team to allow omnichannel routing for voicemails and abandoned calls
We don't have a direct line, we only allow voicemails/abandoned calls. This is why these should be part of the routing. Now we need to assign them manually, which is a hassle and the opposite of efficiency :)
We have also encountered the issue that voicemail tickets are no longer categorized as coming from the ‘Voicemail’ channel. Since tickets are created at the time the call enters the queue rather than after they are picked up or after the voicemail is left. This has caused huge issues with our triggers that have used the condition ‘Channel > is > Voicemail’ or even being able to set up views to capture voicemail tickets.
Adding my voice to those who would like to see these gaps in the product addressed sooner rather than later, as they significantly impact the efficacy of OCR and our agents' and managers' perception of it. We appreciate your looking at it and prioritizing it, if possible.
+1 for this. ZenDesk has not done well with implementing functionality with voicemail management. It would be one thing if I could also apply an SLA to voicemail tickets to hold agents accountable for returning voicemails within a timeframe but neither auto-assignment or SLA adherance is available for Voicemails. It would be nice to see ZenDesk work on this base level call center functionality.
Hi, I can confirm it is on the roadmap (H1 2025) to be able to route voicemail tickets as if they were an email ticket.
@lara13 You can apply SLA policies to voicemail tickets. Setup a voicemail SLA using confitions below:
Note that some voicemail tickets may be initially created as incoming call tickets, and then a few moments later be changed to voicemail tickets - it depends if the end user requested voicemail while in the queue or after call was assigned to agent. In this case, the above conditions wont catch the voicemail ticket as the channel is initially incoming call. To address this try:
create a temporary trigger that looks at ticket updates where they can add a special tag to these tickets by using the conditions below:
then create a copy of your voicemail SLA policy, but include the special_voicemail tag as a must have condition. These two SLA policies should cover all your voicemail tickets then
cc: @rohan11
Thank you for your reply @barry14. I have previously attempted to create SLA policies in the manner you've outlined here and it just doesn't work. I need to track first reply time to voicemails. The trouble is that the fulfillment of SLAs cannot be triggered by an internal note/comment. Phone calls for my team are set to Internal, as are any notes related to phone calls. If we attempt to return a voicemail within our SLA (first reply time), and leave the ticket open for additional attempts in outreach, there is no way to satisfy the SLA. As you can see here, this is a feature request with ZenDesk leaving me in the same place I've started.
@lara13 I was in the same boat, but the advanced SLA rules that were recently released solved this problem.
That being said, there was a bug with them and they were rolled back. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7411959450778-Announcing-advanced-SLA-configuration-settings
I recently reached out to support asking if they were going to be re-released and it sounds like they are hoping to do so sometime in Q1 2025. Depending on how complex your SLAs are, the bug they are addressing may not actually impact you (it did not impact us). I would reach out to your support team and see if any exception can be made and these settings can be turned back on.
With the advanced settings, I made a clone of each of my ticket SLAs and specified they were only for Voice channels. I then used the Advanced SLA settings to activate the First Reply SLA for Private Comments only for voice tickets. This worked like a charm until the settings were rolled back. Depending on how your SLAs are configured, you may be able to request an exception and have these settings turned back on.
Thank you @aaron11. As I was researching this, I found the content regarding the Advanced SLA configuration settings and moments later found that the feature was rolled back. That absolutely would have solved my problem, you're correct. I hadn't considered requesting an exception to having the settings turned back on - thank you for the suggestion.
This issue needs to be addressed urgently. As an in-house IT support team, approximately 90% of our tickets originate from phone calls, as our users prefer speaking directly with an agent. Due to the nature of these requests, many users leave voicemails. In my opinion, an abandoned call represents a frustrated user who couldn't reach support promptly.
While our agents are instructed to monitor the unassigned queue and manage it accordingly, this passive approach is unfair to our customers as that may take longer than necessary.
I have two primary concerns with Zendesk, and this is one of them. Knowing the release schedule for this feature would help alleviate some of our frustration. This feature is available on other platforms out of the box.
Hi, this capability is currently slated for Q4 2026 - but that is subject to chnage. \
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