FAQs: Assignment Rules
What is an assignment rule and why do I need it?
Assignment rule is an automation tool that lets the support administrator automate the process of assigning tickets to agents.
Customer support is a crucial job, and timely and effective resolution of tickets is essential to maintaining customer trust in your business.
Customer satisfaction is directly proportional to the efficiency with which customer issues are managed. If a ticket is received but not processed on time, such as if it is a pending assignment to an agent for a week, it will directly impact the overall customer experience. This can lead to customer distrust and lost revenue.
The automation rule helps to efficiently manage the ticket assignment process by routing tickets to agents based on their skills, departments, and specializations.
For example, if you receive thousands of tickets daily, it is not feasible to handle and assign them manually. The drawbacks of manual assignment include tickets being assigned to the wrong agent with the wrong skill set, or when they are unavailable, tickets being missed due to human error, tickets taking a long time to resolve, and agent productivity being hampered.
If an assignment rule is configured, tickets will be checked against the criteria that is set and assigned to the appropriate agents, ensuring immediate attention and quick resolution. This will result in fewer backlogs, faster resolution, higher efficiency, and a reduced risk of tickets going unattended or unresolved.
Users with Profile permission to manage Help Desk Automation can activate or deactivate the assignment rules. When you deactivate a rule, it will be labeled as Inactive. Assignment rules can be reactivated, when needed.
What is the difference between a direct assignment rule, a round robin assignment rule, and skill based assignment rule?
A direct assignment rule is organization-specific and is used to assign tickets to agents, groups, or teams directly, regardless of the departments to which they belong. This rule can be used to assign tickets to agents directly and move the tickets from one department to another when needed.
For example, if a ticket is related to order and delivery, it should be assigned to the appropriate department where agents are specialized to handle these cases.
If the support admin has configured a direct assignment rule, the rule criteria can be defined as "subject is orders or delivery," and the keywords can include terms like orders, delivery, shipment, consignments, and so on. Based on this, the tickets will be routed to the department responsible for order and delivery, and the agents or teams within that department will be displayed. The support admin can then select the groups, agents, teams, or both, to assign tickets.
Similarly, a direct assignment rule can be implemented at the organization level to categorize tickets based on the departments and teams responsible for handling them.
A round robin assignment rule is department-specific and is used to assign tickets to agents, groups, or teams within a department. Round robin ticket assignment works on the basis of load sharing by agents. The round-robin assignment rule will distribute and assign the incoming tickets equally amongst a group of agents. In order to not overload the agents, the support admin can set a threshold for tickets, which is the maximum number of tickets that can be assigned to each agent at a time. So, tickets are assigned to the least loaded agent first and are then distributed to other agents in the group until they reach the threshold you’ve set.
The skill-based assignment rule is a part of the round robin assignment rule, which assigns tickets to agents based on their skills. For example, if there is a ticket referring to a technical issue, the agents assigned to it should possess technical knowledge to understand the issue. In that case, the skill requirement for the agent will be technical. Similarly, if the ticket is from a specific country and there are agents who work in that specific time zone and are familiar with the language, the tickets will be assigned to agents with the corresponding language as a skill type. Here, language is the skill, such as English, German, or French.
How do I configure a direct assignment rule?
Users with Profile permission for managing Help Desk Automation can create assignment rules.
To configure a direct assignment rule:
- Navigate to Setup (
) > Automation > Assignment Rule
- On the Direct Assignment Rules List page, click New Direct Assignment
- On the New Direct Assignment Rule page, do the following:
- Enter the Rule Name.
- Specify the Execution Criteria for the rule.
- You can choose either Ticket Creation or Ticket Updation or both.
- Click Add Target.
- On the Add Target page, do the following:
- Ticket coming to department: Select the department where you would receive the tickets.
- Criteria: Enter criteria for the rule. You can associate up to 25 criteria using AND/OR operators.
- Move ticket to: Select the department were you want the tickets to be moved.
- Assign ticket to: Select the agent who should be assigned as the owner of the tickets.
- Click Save.
How do I configure round a robin assignment rule and a skilled based rule in my desk account?
Round-robin ticket assignment is a department-specific rule that distributes incoming tickets equally among a group of agents. To prevent overloading agents, the support admin can set a threshold for tickets, which is the maximum number of tickets that can be assigned to each agent at a time. The threshold can be set from 1 to 200. Tickets are first assigned to the least loaded agent, and then to other agents in the group until they reach the threshold.
If all agents have reached their threshold and incoming tickets cannot be assigned, the support admin can toggle on "Assign Backlogs" and set a threshold for backlog tickets from 1 to 50. Once agents resolve tickets, the round-robin rule will check for and assign backlog tickets to agents with available threshold.
Your support admin can choose whether to assign backlog tickets based on the due date or the date it was created to available agents. They can also define whether the incoming tickets should be assigned to agents or added to backlogs.
Round robin assignment rules can be assigned to teams or agents. In the case of a team, the tickets will be assigned to the agents in that team according to the load.
The skilled based rule is similar to the round robin rule. The only difference is that the tickets will be assigned to the agents having the skill set defined in the criteria to handle tickets.
The skilled based rule is similar to the round robin rule. The only difference is that the tickets will be assigned to the agents having the skill set defined in the criteria to handle tickets.
Users with the profile permission to manage Help Desk Automation can create assignment rules.
To configure a round robin assignment rule:
- Go to Setup (
) > Automation > Assignment Rule.
- Click Round Robin under the Assignment Rules sub-menu.
- On the Round Robin Rules list page, click New Round Robin Assignment.
- Select the department from the available departments drop-down for which you want to create this rule.
- On the New Round Robin Assignment page for the selected department, complete the following steps:
- Enter the Rule Name.
- Specify the Execution Criteria for the rule.
- You can choose either Ticket Creation or Ticket Updation or both.
- Click Add Target.
- On the Add Target page, complete the following steps:
- Criteria: Enter criteria for the rule. You can associate up to 25 criteria using AND/OR operators.
- Assignment Method: You may choose an assignment method from Round Robin assignment and Skill Based assignment.
- Assign ticket to: Select the agent who should be assigned as the owner of the tickets.
- Click Save.
Similarly, while creating a round robin assignment rule, if you choose assignment method as skills, select Skill based Assignment as the Assigning Method. Specify who should be assigned to tickets based on their skills.
You can select between:
- Agents: Select the assignees from the drop-down menu.
- Team Select a team from the drop-down menu to add all of their agents.
You can exclude agents within a team by checking the Exclude agents from this assignment option.
Note:
- The rule will not reassign tickets that were assigned via other automations.
- The rule will not assign more tickets than the number specified under threshold.
What happens to incoming tickets once the agent threshold is met for a round-robin rule?
If an agent's threshold is reached, any surplus tickets created in Zoho Desk are held back in a queue (backlog queue). The tickets from this queue are assigned to agents as and when they resolve the tickets that are assigned to them.
What modules are supported in automation rules?
Workflow rules and Schedules are supported by all the system-defined modules in Desk.
Rest all other automation rules, such as Assignment rules, Skills, SLA, Macros, and Notify, are only supported for tickets module.
What happens when criteria overlap in automation rules?
In general, automation rule criteria do not overlap. However, it is possible that the criteria defined in different rules may interfere with each other, such as assignment rules and workflow rules.
If there is overlap of criteria in automation rules, the order of precedence will be followed during execution. The first rule that matches the criteria will be triggered, followed by the next rule, and so on.
Once a rule has been applied to a record, it will not be triggered again by that rule unless the record's criteria change. In other words, a record will only be processed by each automation rule once.
For example, if an assignment rule is applied to a ticket and the ticket's department is changed, the assignment rule will not be triggered again for that ticket. This is because the criteria for the assignment rule have changed.
The only exception to this is the supervise rule. Supervise rules can be triggered periodically, even if the record's criteria have not changed.
Note: In the case of Blueprint execution, tickets will undergo blueprint transition before supervise or macros can be applied to them.
Can I deactivate or delete an assignment rule ?
Yes, you can deactivate or delete an assignment rule.
To deactivate assignment rules:
- Click the Setup icon (
) in the top bar.
- In the Setup Landing page, click Assignment Rules under Automation.
- In the Direct Assignment Rules List page, click to open a rule.
- In the Rule Details page, uncheck the Active option.
- Click Save.
Note: If you don't want to use Direct Assignment Rules that have been configured, you can toggle it to deactivate all rules at once.
Deleting Assignment Rules
Assignment rules can be deleted when not in use. When you delete a rule, it will be permanently removed from your account and cannot be recovered.
To delete assignment rules:
- Click the Setup icon (
) in the top bar.
- In the Setup Landing page, click Assignment Rules under Automation.
- In the Direct Assignment Rules List page, click the Delete icon (
) for the corresponding rule.
- Click OK to confirm.
We hope that this list of frequently asked questions about Assignment Rules are informative. If you still have questions that haven't been addressed, please let us know. We will be happy to discuss them with our subject matter experts and add them in the future. And please don't forget to share your rating below!Access your files securely from anywhere
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