Why does our Zendesk AI agent randomly show as offline?

That pattern often points to session conflicts. If a user or admin logs into Zendesk using the same credentials as the AI agent, the platform can override the AI integration and make it appear offline. It’s not obvious, but the AI agent account must stay exclusive to the automation engine.

Yes — because Zendesk treats agent accounts and automation engines as the same identity surface. If the same account is logged in twice (once as a human and once as the automated AI agent), the system can flip the status to offline and stop routing messages. The fix is usually to reauthorize the AI agent integration and ensure no one else uses that account interactively.

Routing and handoff stalls can come from group misconfiguration or department mismatch. When conversations are escalated, Zendesk looks at group settings and priorities. If the target group doesn’t exist or is offline, the agent won’t answer or can spin indefinitely waiting. Checking group mappings and handoff logic often resolves that issue.

Yes, logging and monitoring are critical here. Capturing the automation engine logs, Zendesk status codes, and router handoff events in real time gives teams a way to correlate offline events with specific triggers or configuration changes. Without that visibility, intermittent drops feel random when they often have a root cause.

Yes, that’s surprisingly common. Platforms like Zendesk are great at ticketing and agent workflows, but when you build AI agents on top, the orchestration layer — where conversation state, routing decisions, handoffs, and agent status all come together — becomes external to the core product. Without a unified orchestration view, intermittent offline states and misrouted handoffs feel like bugs even when they are structural.

Yes. Instead of relying solely on the built-in AI agent status and handoff logic, some teams introduce a conversation orchestration layer that tracks agent availability, routing decisions, fallback states, and escalation paths independently. That way, even if the underlying platform reports the agent offline or routing stalls, the system can gracefully recover, requeue, or hand off without interrupting the customer. This is where SmartCog’s architectural model shines — it externalizes state, monitors routing logic centrally, and ensures consistent automated support even when the platform flips status bits internally.

Exactly. Once you treat routing, agent status, and escalation as part of a resilient conversation network — not just a sequence of platform API calls — many of the ‘offline’ and ‘handoff stall’ issues stop being random and start becoming predictable, manageable conditions that your system can work around.