Automation #13 - Auto assign tickets based on agent shift time

This is a monthly series designed to help you get the best out of Desk. We take our cue from what's being discussed or asked about the most in our community. Then we find the right use cases that specifically highlight solutions, ideas and tips to optimize your customer support with the automation capabilities of Zoho Desk.

 

Business working in shifts need to adopt a different dynamic for customer support. For a seamless flow of tickets from one agent to another, it is important to avoid unnecessary delays that make angry customers. A simple two-step automation in Desk will let you ensure your incoming tickets are assigned to agents in the current shift. Giving your customer support teams to work in better co-ordination.

 

To achieve this first the ticket needs to be moved into the unassigned bucket. Then we use a custom function to achieve a round robin mechanism without load balancing to assign these tickets in the current shift.

As always, the first step to making the most of ZohoDesk's automation capabilities is to create a connection to be used in the custom function later. 

To create a  connection, carry out the following steps:

1. Click on Setup > Developer Space > Connections 
   
   
2. Click Create Connection
   
   
3. In the Pick Your Service section, under Pre-Defined Services find and select Zoho Desk.
   
   
4. In the Connection Details section, add zohodesk as the Connection Name and Connection LinkName
   
   
5. In the Choose Scopes list, select all values that start with 'Desk.' and end with '.ALL' and then include Desk.search.READ, Desk.products.READ
   
6. Click Create and Connect
   
7. In the page that appears, click Connect
   

Now move the tickets to the unassigned bucket, by follow these steps:

1. Go to Setup, and under Automation, click Workflows.
   
2. On the left panel, under Workflows, click Rules > Create Rule.
   In the Basic Information section, carry out the following steps:
3. In the Module drop-down menu, select Tickets.
   
   
4. Enter a name and description for the rule.
   
5. If you want to activate the rule right away, select the Active checkbox. Else, you can just create the rule now and activate it later, on the Rules page.
   
   
6. Click Next.
   In the Execute on section, perform the following steps:
7. Select the Create checkbox to execute this rule every time a new ticket is created.  
   
   
8. Click Next.
   In the Criteria section, do not select any criteria and move to the next section.
   In the Actions section, carry out the following steps:
9. Click the + icon and select Custom Functions > New
   
10. Click Edit Arguments
    
    
11. In the Name field type TicketID, and from the Value drop-down list select Ticket Id under Ticket Information.
    In the script window, input the Custom Function you find below:
    orgId = "paste orgId here";
    contactId = "paste contact ID here";
    TicketInfo = zoho.desk.getRecordById(orgId, "tickets", TicketID,"zohodesk");
    departmentId = TicketInfo.get("departmentId");
    agentId = TicketInfo.get("assigneeId");
    Param = Map();
    Param.put("departmentId", departmentId);
    Param.put("limit", "20");
    onlineagents = invokeurl
    [
    url: "https://desk.zoho.com/api/v1/onlineAgents?"
    type: GET
    parameters: Param
    connection:"zohodesk"
    ];
    if (onlineagents.notContains(agentId))
    {
    info zoho.desk.update(orgId, "tickets", TicketID,{"assigneeId":null},"zohodesk");
    } 

Note: navigate to Setup > Developer Space > API > get orgId and replace in custom function.

To achieve the round robin automation without load balancing, follow these steps:

Pre-requisite:

1. In the Contacts Layout, create two fields:
   
1. Add a multi-line field and name it as Agent List
   
2. Add a single-line field and name it Next Agent
   
2. For the values, collect and save all the agentIds in the Agent List and the First Agent in the Next Agent Field. Please note that the Agent List should be a comma separated values. 
   

To create the workflow rule, perform the following steps:

1. Go to Setup, and under Automation, click Workflows.
   
2. On the left panel, under Workflows, click Rules > Create Rule.
   In the Basic Information section, carry out the following steps:
3. In the Module drop-down menu, select Tickets.
   
4. Enter a name and description for the rule.
   
5. If you want to activate the rule right away, select the Active checkbox. Else, you can just create the rule now and activate it later, on the Rules page.
   
6. Click Next.
   In the Execute on section, perform the following steps:
7. Select the Create checkbox to execute this rule every time a new ticket is created. 
   
8. Click Next.
   In the Criteria section, do not select any criteria and move to the next section.
   In the Actions section, carry out the following steps:
9. Click the + icon and select Custom Functions > New
   
10. Click Edit Arguments
    
11. In the Name field type TicketID, and from the Value drop-down list select Ticket Id under Ticket Information.
    
12. In the script window, input the Custom Function you find below: 
    

orgId = "paste orgId here";

contactId = "paste contact ID here";

TicketInfo = zoho.desk.getRecordById(orgId, "tickets", TicketID,"zohodesk");

departmentId = TicketInfo.get("departmentId");

agentId = TicketInfo.get("assigneeId");

Param = Map();

Param.put("departmentId", departmentId);

Param.put("limit", "20");

checkAvail = invokeurl

[

url :"https://desk.zoho.com/api/v1/onlineAgents?departmentId=" + departmentId + "&include=mailStatus,phoneStatus,chatStatus,phoneMode,presenceStatus"

type :GET

connection:"zohodesk"

];

if (!checkAvail.toString().contains(agentId.toString()))

{

stopLoop = "false";

contactInfo = zoho.desk.getRecordById(orgId,"contacts",contactId);

allAgents = contactInfo.getJSON("cf").getJSON("cf_agent_list").toList();

elist = {"1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","10","11","12","13","14"};

for each  agent in elist

{

contactInfo = zoho.desk.getRecordById(orgId,"contacts",contactId,"zohodesk");

nextAgent = contactInfo.getJSON("cf").getJSON("cf_next_agent").toLong();

if(checkAvail.toString().contains(nextAgent.toString()) && stopLoop == "false")

{

assignTicket = zoho.desk.update(orgId,"tickets",TicketID,{"assigneeId":allAgents.get(allAgents.indexOf(nextAgent))},"zohodesk");

if(allAgents.indexOf(nextAgent).toLong() < allAgents.size().toLong() - 1)

{

updateContact = zoho.desk.update(orgId,"contacts",contactId,{"cf":{"cf_next_agent":allAgents.get(allAgents.indexOf(nextAgent) + 1)}},"zohodesk");

}

else

{

updateContact = zoho.desk.update(orgId,"contacts",contactId,{"cf":{"cf_next_agent":allAgents.get("0")}},"zohodesk");

}

stopLoop = "true";

}

else if(stopLoop == "false")

{

if(allAgents.indexOf(nextAgent).toLong() < allAgents.size().toLong() - 1)

{

updateContact = zoho.desk.update(orgId,"contacts",contactId,{"cf":{"cf_next_agent":allAgents.get(allAgents.indexOf(nextAgent) + 1)}},"zohodesk");

}

else

{

updateContact = zoho.desk.update(orgId,"contacts",contactId,{"cf":{"cf_next_agent":allAgents.get("0")}},"zohodesk");

}

}

}

}

Note: navigate to Setup > Developer Space > API > to get orgId and replace it in the custom function.

 

• Topic Participants

• Chinmayee Mishra

  

• SONIC TELESERVICES

• Ash | Zoho Desk

  

• Alvin Enriquez

• Cilia

• Sticky Posts

• Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community

  With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features

• Share your Zoho Desk story with us!

  Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge. 

• Tip #1: Learn to pick the right channels

  Mail, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms—there are so many support channels out there. Trying to pick the right channels to offer your customers can get pretty confusing. Emails are most useful when the customer wants to put things on record. However, escalated or complicated issues should not be resolved over email because it's slow and impersonal.  When you need immediate responses, live chat is more suitable. It's also quick and convenient, so it's the go-to channel for small issues. 

• Welcome to Zoho Desk Community - Say hello here!

  Hello everyone! Though we have been here for a while, it’s time to formally establish the Zoho Desk Community; we’re really happy to have you all here! This can be the place where you take a moment to introduce yourself to the rest of the community. We’d love to hear all about you, what you do, what company or industry you work for, how you use Zoho Desk and anything else that you will like to share! Here’s a little about me. I am Chinmayee. I have been associated with Zoho since 2014. I joined here

• Webinar 1: Blueprint for Customer Service

  With the launch of a host of new features in Zoho Desk, we thought it’ll be great to have a few webinars to help our customers make the most of them. We’re starting off with our most talked about feature, Blueprint in Zoho Desk. You can register for the Blueprint webinar here: The webinar will be delivered by our in-house product experts. This is a good opportunity to ask questions to our experts and understand how Blueprint can help you automate your service processes. We look forward to seeing

• Recent Topics

• Tables for Europe Datacenter customers?

  It's been over a year now for the launch of Zoho Tables - and still not available für EU DC customers. When will it be available?

• Zoho Finance Limitations 2.0 #3: Can't assign a Contact to a Finance Record (estimate, sales order or invoice)

  If you use a business to business scenario with different contact people within the company you can't assign a finance record (estimate, invoice, etc...) to that person. Why this matters? No way to find out which person placed the order without manual

• Ranking by group in report

  Dears, I am new to Zoho Analytics and I would like to ask you guys help to creating a ranking column. Report type: Pivot Matter: I want to create a ranking column on the right of Percentage. This ranking is group by column Type, and ranking by Final Score/Percent.

• Zoho CRM for Everyone's NextGen UI Gets an Upgrade

  Hello Everyone We've made improvements to Zoho CRM for Everyone's Nextgen UI. These changes are the result of valuable feedback from you where we’ve focused on improving usability, providing wider screen space, and making navigation smoother so everything

• Introducing Bigin's Add-in for Microsoft Outlook

  Hello Everyone, Email is an important way to communicate with customers and prospects. If you use Outlook.com for emails and Bigin as your CRM, the Outlook Add-in helps you connect them easily so you can see your Bigin contact details right inside Outlook.com.

• Zoho Community Digest — Febrero 2026

  ¡Hola, comunidad! Un mes más os traemos las novedades más interesantes de Zoho para febrero de 2026, incluyendo actualizaciones de producto publicadas oficialmente, cambios de políticas y noticias del ecosistema. Pero antes de lanzarnos a las actualizaciones,

• Disable Zoho Contacts

  We don't want to use this app... How can we disable it?

• Department Overview by Modified Time

  We are trying to create visuals to show the work our agents do in Zoho Desk. Using Zoho Analytics how can we create a Department Overview per modified time and not ticket created time? In order for us to get an accurate view of the work our agents are

• Filter button in the Zoho Sheet Android App doesn't toggle on

  I am a new Zoho Sheets user and experiencing a specific issue with the filter functionality in the Android mobile application. Detailed Issue Description: The filter icon appears correctly in the toolbar. Upon tapping the filter icon/button, the toggle

• Is there a way to show contact emails in the Account?

  I know I can see the emails I have sent and received on a Contact detail view, but I want to be able to see all the emails that have been sent and received between all an Accounts Contacts on the Account Detail view. That way when I see the Account detail

• Empty folders are now appearing in the sidebar...

  ...and the folder list is now auto-collapsed by default with no way to change. Neither of these recent updates are useful or user-friendly. ==================== Powered by Haiku https://www.haiku.co.uk ====================

• Fix image at bottom of a page fot automatic proposal creation

  I'm working on a proposal document to automate our proposal creation process. So far it works fine, but I experience some problems with an image I want to have fixed at the bottom of the page AND above the footer. This section of the document consists

• 【Zoho CRM】商談タブへのデータインポート

  Zoho使用前にエクセルで管理していた商談情報を、Zoho一括管理のため、商談タブにインポートしたいのですが、お客さまの氏名だけが紐づけられませんでした。 「Zoho CRMにインポートする項目を関連付ける」のところが画像のようになっています。 （弊社では、「姓」を「★個人データ名」という項目名に変更し、フルネームを入れて使用しています。） どのようにしたら氏名をインポートできるかご存じの方がいらっしゃいましたら、ご教示いただきたく、よろしくお願いいたします。 （投稿先が間違っていましたらご指

• CRM Cadences recognise auto-responses

  I have leads in a Cadence. I get an auto-responder reply "I'm out of the office..." Normally Cadences seems to know that isn't a real reply and keeps the lead enrolled in the cadence. However, today, Cadences has UNENROLLED a Lead who sent an auto-reponse

• SalesIQ Chat Notifications

  I am the admin of our salesIQ implementation. About two weeks ago, I started hearing/seeing notification for ALL chats messages from monitored agents/chat participants. I don't need to see these, we have a manager who deals with this. I can't stop the

• How to Create a Fixed Sliding Time Window (D-45 to D-15) in Zoho Analytics ?

  Hello, I would like to create a report in Zoho Analytics based on a sliding time window between D-45 and D-15, with a fixed snapshot of that specific period. The data displayed should strictly reflect activity recorded between D-45 and D-15 only, without

• Export Zoho Books to another accounting package?

  Is an export feature to Quickbooks or Accpac available (or a form that is easily imported by them)?  My reasons: 1) my accountant, who prepares my corporate tax return, prefers to work with their own accounting system.  If I can convert Zoho books a form that is easily importable into Quickbooks or an Accpac format, this process would be easy. 2) I don't want to keep my data in a proprietary format on the cloud somewhere without a way to easily extract it to a format that can be read my a well established

• Anchor Links in Dashboards

  Hello,  Our dashboards frequently have multiple sections that would be more easily skipped between using anchor links. Please consider adding an anchor link feature to the text widget? This could be done by adding an anchor link option to the text widget next to the "remove" option (see screenshot). The option would assign an ID to the <div> containing the text widget in the live dashboard. Then, the chosen ID could be linked using a traditional <a href="#link_id"> in the html section of the text

• Add "Reset MFA" Option for Zoho Creator Client Portal Users

  Hello Zoho Creator Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to request an important enhancement related to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for client portal users in Zoho Creator. Currently, Creator allows us to enforce MFA for portal users,

• system not picking my default custom service report template

  Can you tell me why when we create a service report always pick the (standard old) template? Even when I have a custom service report selected as Default.

• Introducing Auto-trigger for Screening Bot

  Still manually sending screening tests after every application? Not anymore. With Auto-trigger for Screening Bot, screening now begins automatically. When a candidate applies for a job that has an attached assessment, Recruit checks whether the test has

• SEO for your Zoho Sites Website

  Join our live webinar to learn how to use Zoho Sites' SEO tools to boost your website's ranking. Our product specialist will demonstrate everything you need to know about optimizing your web pages to make them search engine friendly. Register here for free: https://www.zoho.com/sites/webinars/

• Importing into Multiselect Picklist

  Hi, We just completed a trade show and one of the bits of information we collect is tool style. The application supplied by the show set this up as individual questions. For example, if the customer used Thick Turret and Trumpf style but not Thin Turret,

• New 2026 Application Themes

  Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position

• Add line item numbers to sales order/invoice creation page

  It would be really helpful if there were line numbers visible as we are creating a sales order and/or invoice. There are line numbers visible in the PDF once the sales order is created. I would like to be able to see the line numbers as I am building

• API to Apply Retainer invoice payment to Invoice

  Hi Team, I could not find  API to apply the Retainer invoice payment to existing Invoice. Can you please help ? Attaching the screenshot

• Reconciling a month with no transactions

  I'm treasurer for a small non profit cemetery association and I'm trying to reconcile a bank statement for a month that did not have any transactions. Do I skip the month entirely and go a month with transactions?

• Collapsing and expanding of lists and paragraphs

  hello Would you ever implement Collapsing and expanding of lists and paragraphs in zoho writer ? Best regards

• push notification to Cliq when user is @mentioned in CRM notes

  push notification to Cliq when user is @mentioned in CRM notes. Currently users that is @mentioned gets an email to be notified. User/s that is @mentioned should get a Cliq notification.

• Customize your Booking page using Zia

  We’re excited to introduce an AI-based enhancement that automatically customizes your booking page effortlessly. By simply providing your business website URL, Zoho Bookings can automatically design a booking page that matches or complements your brand

• Multiple header in the quote table???

  Hello, Is it possible in Zoho CRM to add multiple headers or sections within the Quote product table, so that when the quote is printed it shows separate sections (for example “Products” and “Services”)? To clarify, I’m asking because: This does not appear

• Feature Request: Render Markdown (.md) files in Zoho Cliq

  Hi, We regularly share Markdown (.md) files in Zoho Cliq. However, when we open these files in Cliq, the content does not render as Markdown—it displays as plain text. This forces us to copy/paste the content into an external Markdown viewer to read it

• Zoho Workdrive download was block by security software

  Hi Team, Recently workdrive download was blocked by huorong security. Could you please advise how to put zoho workdrive as white list? every time we put "*.zohoexternal.com" or "workdrive.zohoexternal.com", the warning msg will still pop in next dow

• Merged cells are unmerging automatically

  Hello, I have been using Zoho sheets from last 1 year. But from last week facing a issue in merged cells. While editing all merged cells in a sheet became unmerged. I merged it again, but it again unmerged. In my half an hour work I have to do this 3-4

• Zoho mail to contacts and leads, but not to accounts?

  We use the accounts tab a lot for our business because they can be linked to the sales orders. Now we want to use the mail add on to link communication of our emails to our accounts. However this is only possible for contacts and leads? It would be convenient

• API keys not showing in ZeptoMail dashboard

  Hi there, I'm hoping someone can provide some assistance as support isn't replying. I am trying to configure my transactional emails, but the dashboard doesn't show any of my API details - the `div` is there but it's emtpy. Every time I click "Generate

• Does Zoho Learn integrate with Zoho Connect,People,Workdrive,Project,Desk?

  Can we propose Zoho LEarn as a centralised Knowledge Portal tool that can get synched with the other Zoho products and serve as a central Knowledge repository?

• Reading from and writing to Zoho Projects Custom Module with Deluge

  Does anyone know if there is a way to read from and write to the Custom Modules that Zoho now supports. I would love to be able to loop through a set of data and create the entities I need to for this new custom module I'm looking to put together.

• How Does Knowledge Base Search and Article Recommendation Work?

  Hello, I would like to understand how the Knowledge Base search engine works. Specifically, does it search based on: The article title only? The full article content? Both, the article and the content? Keywords? Tags? Also, how does the system determine

• Zoho Books/Inventory - Restrict Items With Pricebook

  Hi Zoho Team, I'm trying to address as use case where a client needs to restrict which products certain customers can purchase. I have been able to find a way to do this based on the current Zoho Books or Zoho Inventory configuation. My feature request

• Next Page