Playlist is designed around Zendesk best practices. If you're already following best practices, setup should be a breeze. Here are some guidelines and tips to help you prepare for your implementation.
Groups
The integration works best when groups are well implemented. Tags and other fields may be useful in routing tickets to the appropriate group (via triggers), but they shouldn't be a substitute for groups.
Here's a great article on best practices for groups in Zendesk.
Views
Unassigned tickets (queues)
Create a separate unassigned tickets view for each group. These views will serve as your ticket queues in Playlist. Each view must include the condition (meet ALL): Assignee > Is > -.
There is a limit of 50 queues per account (subdomain). This is mainly to prevent you from hitting Zendesk's API limits, but please contact us know if you think you'll need more queues.
Your unsolved tickets view
Agents should have access to a view that shows them all of their assigned tickets. Unless you have specific requirements on what the agent should see, the default "Your unsolved tickets" view that is included with Zendesk should work just fine.
Automations
In case agents go offline or can't respond to tickets in time, you can create an automation to send tickets back to their queue so that they can be reassigned to another agent.
Ticket Status
In order for Playlist to work properly, it's important to use ticket statuses as they were designed to be used in Zendesk. Here are some common pitfalls to watch out for:
Relying on the New status
When a new ticket is assigned to an agent for the first time, Zendesk automatically updates its status from New to Open. This is the case for Playlist and all other methods of ticket assignment (manual, triggers, etc.). Once in the Open status, it cannot be changed back to New.
You will have to revisit your process if you're relying on the New status (i.e. responding directly to New tickets).
Keeping tickets in the Open status
Playlist calculates the agent's capacity (bandwidth to take on more tickets) based on the number of open tickets assigned to them. If your agents are not updating tickets to Pending, On-Hold, or Solved after responding to the requester, you won't be able to leverage the Playlist's load balancing capabilities.
Skills-based routing (Enterprise)
Playlist now supports skills-based routing. If you have tickets that require specific skills such as language, you may want to consider implementing skills-based routing to improve your workflow in Zendesk.
We still recommend using groups wherever it makes sense, but skills-based routing is a great way to simplify your queues and get tickets to the right agents efficiently.