Bring Back the Functionality of Focus Mode for Messaging and Talk
Feature Request Summary:
Messaging and talk are both live channels and it is not possible to simultaneously have a verbal conversation in talk while having a typed conversation with a different customer in messaging.
Description/Use Cases:
Prior to the launch of messaging, focus mode allowed agents to be online for both talk and chat at the same time. They would only receive one type of live contact at a time, allowing for them to handle either calls or chats at any given time, and to switch back and forth between the channels based on routing. For small teams, this flexibility removed the need to schedule one or two agents to calls and one or two agents to chat, and meant that when volume shifted to be higher on one channel over another, this need was easily met by the systems already in Zendesk.
With messaging, this functionality broke. Prior to omnichannel, agents would get locked into messaging and calls would not route to them if focused mode was enabled. With the launch of omnichannel, now both calls and messages will route at the same time which is equally as problematic, if not moreso.
Business impact of limitation or missing feature:
Focus mode was a useful feature that allowed for flexibility of scheduling and variety of work in an agent's workflow. Omnichannel reflects that one person can't handle 2 calls at once, but still routes messaging - a live channel, to someone who is on a call. This is counter-intuitive and I don't know what the purpose of a unified status is if it's not going to actually intelligently route work to agents who are available to handle it. (It's meaningless to be online for messaging and talk if the system is going to route to both channels at the same time.)
This seems like a major oversight in the development of a feature that our team had been looking forward to in hopes that it would solve an ongoing significant product issue.
Other necessary information or resources:
A community manager indicated that return of focus mode was planned for messaging and talk on this post but no update has been provided recently. Seeing as this problem was not remedied with Omnichannel, and Omnichannel forces disabling focus mode (which doesn't matter since it's broken for anyone using messaging anyways) it would be good to have some guidance around the planned resolution: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4412161208218-Focus-mode-for-active-Messaging-and-Talk-users?page=1#community_comment_5070312720538
As Barry mentioned, this feature has been released. More information can be found here and instructions for set up can be found here. Thank you again for sharing your feedback and for being valuable Zendesk Community members!
At this time I am going to close this post for comment. Should any other feature requests on this matter come up, please feel free to create a new post. Thank you!