Omni-Channel pushes work to agents based on their availability and capacity. It is a good feature and it is often switched on for teams that would be better served by plain queues. These are the questions I ask before recommending it.
Volume and channels
- Which channels do customers use today, and roughly how many cases arrive per week on each?
- Is a new channel such as chat or messaging planned in the next year?
Routing pain
- How does a case reach an agent now: someone assigns it, or agents pull from a queue?
- Are some agents overloaded while others wait?
- Do cases need a specific skill, product line or language, or can anyone on the team take them?
Supervision
- Does a supervisor need a live view of queue depth and who is available?
- Are there response-time targets that differ by channel or customer?
Reading the answers
- Manual assignment and uneven workload: Omni-Channel with capacity-based routing addresses this directly.
- Cases that need the right person, not the next person: add skills-based routing.
- A small team, one or two channels and no complaints about distribution: queues and assignment rules are enough. Revisit when the team grows.
On one recent Service Cloud project we deliberately left Omni-Channel out of the first phase and listed it as a later option. Two regional queues solved the problem the team actually had.