A practical guide to Zendesk Omnichannel routing (2025)

We’ve all been there. You explain an issue to a company’s live chat agent, and everything seems fine. Then you follow up with an email later and find yourself typing out the entire story from scratch. It’s frustrating, and it happens when a company’s support channels aren’t talking to each other. This is exactly the problem that an omnichannel approach is meant to fix by creating one single, seamless conversation.

Zendesk has its own solution for this called Zendesk Omnichannel. In this guide, we’ll get into what it is, how its routing works, what you get for your money, and some of the key limitations you should know about. The goal is to help you figure out if Zendesk’s built-in tools are enough for your team, or if you might need a smarter AI layer to get the automation you’re really after.

What is Zendesk Omnichannel?

Put simply, Zendesk Omnichannel is about connecting all your customer conversations from different places, like email, chat, social media, and phone, into a single, continuous thread. It all happens inside the Zendesk Agent Workspace. The idea is to move beyond just offering multiple support channels and actually link them together so the conversation can flow naturally from one to the next.

It’s easy to mix up "multichannel" and "omnichannel," but the difference is pretty significant for both your customers and your agents.

Feature	Multichannel Support	Omnichannel Support
Channel Integration	Channels are available but operate in their own silos.	Channels are fully integrated and connected.
Customer Experience	A bit disjointed. Customers often have to repeat information.	Seamless. The conversation context follows the customer.
Agent View	Agents see conversations on a channel-by-channel basis.	Agents get a single, unified view of the customer’s entire history.
Data	Customer data is often fragmented across different systems.	Customer data and history are all in one place.

The main benefit is straightforward: customers get a consistent and personal experience, and your agents get the full context they need to solve problems without having to ask, "So, can you remind me what we talked about last week?" It helps make support feel less like a series of separate tickets and more like one long-running conversation.

How Zendesk Omnichannel routing works

The whole system runs on its routing engine, which is designed to automatically assign tickets to the best agent for the job. While Zendesk has traditionally used triggers and manual rules for this, omnichannel routing uses a more advanced, queue-based system to get work to the right people.

Here’s a look at how it all works.

Mermaid Chart Code

The Zendesk Omnichannel ticket queue and prioritization

When a customer gets in touch, their message, email, or call lands in a virtual queue. From there, Zendesk uses a set of rules to figure out which ticket to handle next. You can usually set up the queue to be sorted in one of two ways:

1. Priority and Age: The system first looks for high-priority tickets (like "Urgent") and then sorts those by which one has been waiting the longest.

2. SLA Breach Time: This method prioritizes tickets that are closest to breaching their Service Level Agreement (SLA). It’s often a better approach because it focuses on meeting your promised response times for everyone, not just the customers who shout the loudest.

There’s a small catch with priority-based sorting, though. A low-priority ticket can get stuck at the bottom of the pile indefinitely if new, higher-priority tickets keep coming in. It’s a common trap that can leave some customers feeling like they’ve been forgotten.

Zendesk Omnichannel agent availability, capacity, and skills

Once a ticket gets to the front of the line, Zendesk looks for the best agent available based on three things:

• Status: Agents set a "unified status" like Online, Away, or Offline. A live chat or phone call will only go to an agent who is Online, while an email might be assigned to someone who is Away.

• Capacity: You can set limits on how many conversations an agent can handle at once for each channel. For instance, an agent might be able to handle one phone call, three chats, and five emails simultaneously. Zendesk gives the new ticket to the agent with the most available capacity.

• Skills: If you’re on the Professional plan or higher, you can add skill tags to tickets (like "Spanish," "Billing," or "Product Expert") and match them to agents with the same skills. This is great for making sure complex issues land with specialists.

This system can be pretty effective, but it depends entirely on you setting it up just right. Every single ticket needs the correct group, priority, and skill tags for the routing to do its job. All that manual setup can become a real headache. A more modern approach, using AI tools like eesel AI, can analyze the actual content of a ticket to figure out what the customer needs and route it intelligently, which cuts down on all that manual tagging.

Zendesk Omnichannel features and pricing plans

Your access to the most useful Zendesk Omnichannel features is directly tied to your pricing plan. If you’re on a lower-tier plan, you’ll probably find that some of the best routing tools are just out of reach.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what you get with each of the main "Suite" plans, based on Zendesk’s official pricing.

Feature	Suite Team ($55/agent/mo)	Suite Professional ($115/agent/mo)	Suite Enterprise ($169/agent/mo)
Supported Channels	Email, Messaging, Social, Voice	All Team features	All Professional features
Unified Agent Status	✅ Default statuses (Online, Away)	✅ Default & Custom Statuses	✅ Default & Custom Statuses
Capacity Rules	✅	✅	✅
Routing by Priority	❌ (Default is age-based)	✅	✅
Routing by SLA	❌	✅	✅
Skills-Based Routing	❌	✅	✅
Custom Queues	❌	✅	✅
Live Dashboards	✅ Basic	✅ Basic	✅ Customizable
Sandbox for Testing	❌	Add-on	✅ Included

The pricing tells a pretty clear story. If you’re a small team that wants to use skills-based routing to get tickets to your experts, you have to jump all the way to the Suite Professional plan. That’s more than double the cost per agent of the Suite Team plan. This tiered model can make it expensive to grow your support team, forcing a big financial leap to unlock the features that really boost efficiency.

The limitations of a native Zendesk Omnichannel setup

While Zendesk Omnichannel offers a good starting point, it has some real-world limitations that can prevent teams from getting the kind of hands-off, intelligent automation they need.

Complex Zendesk Omnichannel setup and ongoing maintenance

Getting omnichannel routing right isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It takes a lot of planning to define your queues, skills, triggers, and capacity rules. After you launch, you’ll need to keep an eye on the system and adjust it as your team and business evolve. It’s a pretty big, ongoing administrative lift.

This is quite different from the simplicity of tools like eesel AI, which offers a self-serve setup you can get running in just a few minutes. Thanks to a one-click Zendesk integration, you can start automating support without a massive implementation project.

This workflow illustrates the simple, self-serve setup process for eesel AI, an alternative to the more complex Zendesk Omnichannel configuration.

Zendesk Omnichannel knowledge is stuck in the helpdesk

Zendesk’s routing engine is smart, but it can only see what’s inside Zendesk. It makes decisions based on ticket fields, user data, and agent skills that you’ve entered manually. It can’t pop over to your internal wiki in Confluence, check your product specs in Google Docs, or read your team’s past conversations in Slack to really understand what a ticket is about.

This is a huge blind spot. A truly helpful AI should be able to learn from all of your company’s knowledge. By connecting to help centers, past tickets, and external sources like Notion or SharePoint, eesel AI instantly unifies your knowledge, giving your AI the full picture every time.

This infographic shows how eesel AI connects to multiple knowledge sources, overcoming a key limitation of Zendesk Omnichannel.

Rigid Zendesk Omnichannel automation and limited AI actions

Zendesk’s automation is built on a foundation of rules: if a ticket meets certain conditions, then the system performs a specific action. While this is useful for routing tickets or changing priorities, you can’t easily customize the AI’s personality or have it perform more complex, multi-step tasks. For example, you can’t tell it to look up order details in Shopify, check the shipping status, and then update a ticket field with that info.

With eesel AI, you get full control through a customizable workflow engine. You can define the AI’s tone of voice, tell it which topics it can and can’t answer, and build custom actions that connect to external tools. This gives you the flexibility to automate the exact processes your business actually uses.

This screenshot displays the customization rules in eesel AI, highlighting its flexible automation capabilities compared to the rigid system in Zendesk Omnichannel.

No risk-free way to test and deploy Zendesk Omnichannel

While Zendesk’s top-tier Enterprise plan comes with a sandbox environment, most users don’t have access to one. This means there’s no easy, built-in way to see how your new routing rules would have handled last week’s tickets. You just have to set everything up, cross your fingers, and hope it all works as expected when it goes live.

This is where eesel AI really stands out. Its simulation mode lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your own past tickets. You get accurate forecasts on resolution rates and can see exactly how the AI will respond before it ever talks to a single customer.

The eesel AI simulation mode allows users to test their setup on past tickets, providing a risk-free way to deploy automation that is not available in most Zendesk Omnichannel plans.

Enhance your Zendesk Omnichannel setup with a smarter AI layer

Zendesk Omnichannel is a good foundation for unifying your support channels and moving away from siloed conversations. However, its native routing and automation can be complicated to set up, its knowledge is limited to what’s in Zendesk, and some of its best features are locked behind expensive plans.

To get truly intelligent and scalable automation, you often need more than what comes out of the box. Instead of ripping out a tool your team already knows, you can add a powerful AI layer that works with your existing Zendesk account. With eesel AI, you get the benefits of an advanced, self-serve AI platform without the pain of migrating your entire helpdesk. You keep what works and improve it with AI that learns from all your knowledge, automates any workflow, and lets you test with complete confidence.

Ready to see what that looks like in action? Simulate eesel AI on your Zendesk tickets for free and see your automation potential in minutes.