Helpdesk Ticket Assignment
The Helpdesk Round Robin and Balanced Load ticket assignment features are designed to automate the assignment of tickets to agents. Automatic assignment can quickly become complicated when taking into consideration Holidays, Workday hours, Helpdesk Agent availability (e.g. needing to take lunch or breaks), calculating current ticket load for Balanced Load assignment, etc.
This document will cover all the settings and concepts required to configure your automatic ticket assignment for your Helpdesk Project.
Ticket Assignment Methods
There are two primary methods for ticket assignment:
Round Robin
Tickets are assigned to agents in a sequential order based on their availability and ticket assignment settings.Balanced Load
Tickets are assigned based on the current ticket load of each agent and ticket assignment settings, ensuring a more equitable distribution of work.
Round Robin Assignment
Round Robin assignment is straightforward. Tickets are assigned one at a time, in alphabetical order to all enabled agents who are available. The following criteria must be met:
Agents must be enabled in the Ticket Assignment > Settings tab.
Agents must have their status set to Available.
The ticket assignment settings can be changed to override the requirement for availability or other settings like Respecting Workday hours or Holiday Schedules.
Balanced Load Assignment
Balanced Load assignment is more complex, as it considers the current workload of each agent. The system evaluates the number of tickets each agent has in various transition status “types” (e.g., To Do, In Progress) and assigns tickets accordingly. The following rules apply:
Only enabled and available agents are considered for ticket assignment.
The system calculates the ticket load based on predefined capacities for both status types.
If an agent has reached their capacity for a status, they will not receive additional tickets until their load decreases.
The ticket assignment settings can be changed to override the requirement for availability or other settings like Respecting Workday hours or Holiday Schedules.
Balanced Load Formula:
Workload = (# To Do / To Do Limit) + (# In Progress / In Progress Limit)
(The user with lowest workload is chosen)
Load Balance Example:
Agent 1: 5/10 To Do, 2/2 In Progress
Agent 2: 5/10 To Do, 2/10 In Progress
Who should get the next ticket when using Balanced Load ticket assignment?
The answer is Agent 2. Both Agent 1 and Agent 2 are at 50% capacity for To Do type tickets, but Agent 1 is at 100% capacity for In Progress type tickets, while Agent 2 is only at 20% capacity for In Progress tickets.
Project Ticket Assignment Settings
Ticket assignment settings can be found under the new “Ticket Assignment Method” section of the Project settings page. Each Helpdesk Project has their own individual ticket assignment settings. The default setting is “Manual” ticket assignment, which does not assign tickets to agents automatically.
The other two options, Round Robin and Balanced Load will assign tickets according to the Project’s ticket assignment settings. Click the “Manage Agents” button to manage individual agents in the project. Click the “Settings” button to manage the general settings for ticket assignment. Read more about those settings and controls below.
Project Agents Settings
The “Manage Agents” button will take you to the Agents tab, where Admin role users can manage do the following:
Search and filter the list of users based on role
Enable or disable users for ticket assignment
Set individual ticket assignment limits, per user, per “transition status type”
Enabled vs Disabled
Users who are enabled will be automatically assigned tickets according to the ticket assignment settings, defined on the “Settings” tab.
Disabled users will never be assigned tickets, regardless of ticket assignment settings. A common reason for disabling a user is Helpdesk Managers, who are part of the team, but may not want to be part of the automatic ticket assignment.
Ticket Assignment Limits
Ticket assignment limits server two purposes
They define the maximum number of tickets of a “transition type” the user can be assigned. Transition types include “To Do” and “In Progress”.
e.g. If a user has a limit of 10 “To Do” type tickets, and is currently assigned 10 “To Do” type tickets, they have reached their limit, and will not be assigned another ticket until they have “capacity” for another ticket. These limits may be overridden by options in the settings tab.They define maximum “load” as part of the Balanced Load calculations. e.g. An agent with 5/10 tickets assigned has more load than an agent with 2/10 tickets assigned. Learn more in the Balanced Load section of this document.
Please note:
Limits only apply to the automatic assignment settings. Agents and Manager may still manually assign tickets beyond the limits. e.g. an Agent may have 15/10 To Do tickets.
Limits can be edited from the edit modal.
Project Assignment Settings
The Project Assignment “Settings” tab defines the complex conditions under which tickets are assigned, and in what order they are assigned.
The most important part of ensuring tickets are assigned in the desired order, is ensuring the settings are correctly configured. The settings include:
Ticket Assignment Settings
Default Assignment Capacity
Project Change Settings
Ticket Assignment Order
Ticket Assignment Settings
The options in Ticket Assignment Settings decide whether to respect Helpdesk Agent availability, ticket assignment limits, workday hours, and holiday schedules when assigning tickets.
Radio option - Decides whether to respect Agent availability settings. Read more in the Availability settings section. e.g. If an agent is “unavailable” because they are at lunch, this setting will control whether that user is still assigned a ticket or not.
“Only assign tickets if the agent has not reached capacity…” - When enabled, will not assign tickets beyond the user’s limits defined on the Agents tab. e.g. whether a user with 10/10 tickets assigned is skipped, or assigned a ticket anyways.
“Respect Project Workday settings…” - When enabled, will not assign tickets outside of Workday hours. e.g. If Monday is “disabled” in Project Workday settings. No tickets will be assigned on that day.
“Respect Project Holiday Schedule…” - When enabled, will not assign tickets during Holidays. e.g. If Memorial day is a holiday on the Holiday schedule assigned in Project Workday settings. No tickets will be assigned on that day
Default Assignment Capacity
This setting lets Admins define the default ticket limit and enabled status for new users added to a Helpdesk Project. New users are added to teams, which are included in Projects.
Project Change Settings
Tickets may be moved from one Project to another for a variety of reasons. This setting controls whether the ticket is reassigned according to the assignment settings when it arrives in the Project.
Ticket Assignment Order
Normally tickets are assigned automatically as soon as they are created, however because of Agent availability, Ticket assignment limits, Workday Hours, Holiday Schedules, and tickets moving between projects, there are times when tickets cannot be assigned. These tickets become part of a queue of tickets which will periodically be rechecked and assigned when there is an Agent available for assignment.
The Ticket Assignment Order settings make sure that the most important tickets in that queue get assigned first, instead of just the tickets that were created first.
For example: A ticket that is “Critical” priority and has a higher SLA, e.g. an SLA response or resolution time that is due at a sooner time, may need to be assigned before a “Low” priority ticket which does not need a response as quickly.
The Ticket Assignment Order options include:
Created time - default
SLA Response Due - Tickets with 1st response due or Correspondence due first will be assigned first from the queue.
SLA Resolution Due - Tickets with a Resolution due first will be assigned first from the queue.
Longest Wait Time - Tickets where the reporter has been waiting for a response the longest amount of time, will be assigned first.
Ticket Assignment Queue
The ticket assignment queue is the list of all “unassigned” tickets in the past 7 days that were not automatically assigned according to the Project settings when they were created. This may be because there were no Agents available, no Agents with capacity for another ticket, because the tickets were made outside Workday hours, because they were created during a Holiday, or any combination of reasons.
These unassigned tickets become part of the queue, which runs at the top of the hour and attempts to assign the unassigned tickets according to the Project ticket assignment settings.
Please Note:
At this time, the queue only runs once per hour, at the top of the hour. Some “unassigned” tickets may accumulate if there are no Agents available because of assignment limits or other settings conditions.
Agent Availability Management
Agent availability allows Admins, Helpdesk Managers, or even Agents themselves to control whether they are available for ticket assignment. This setting is useful for Agents who may need to control their availability to block ticket assignments while on break or at lunch.
Agent availability is a Global setting. It is not a per project setting.
Assignment Availability
The Assignment Availability report can be reached from two places. Admin role users can access it from the Settings page, under the Helpdesk section. Helpdesk Managers can access it from the new Ticket Assignment section in the Helpdesk.
The Assignment Availability tab includes a table of all users, their availability, teams, and roles. Users may be searched, or filtered based on the columns. A per Project report can be accessed from the Helpdesk Project Report page.
Global Agent Availability Controls
The Settings tab lets Admins decide whether to allow Agents to manage their own Availability, or limit it to just Admins and Helpdesk Managers. The default settings only allows Admins and Helpdesk Managers to control Agent availability.
When the “Allow Agents to set their own availability status” option is selected, the Agent will be able to set their Ticket Assignment availability via their profile dropdown.
Please Note:
This toggle will only be available in the open profile dropdown. Agents may need to be made aware the option is available to them to know it exists.
Also, remember that the availability may be ignored according to the Project Ticket Assignment settings.
Reporting and Monitoring
Helpdesk Managers can monitor and manage agent limits and ticket assignment through the Assignment Availability and Project Report pages. This new section is only available to Admin and Helpdesk Manager role users.
This page displays:
The Assignment Availability page is the same as the Assignment Availability page in Settings.
Project Report
The Project Report page first provides a list of all Projects. Select the desired Project to get specific report page.
The Project Report page lets Helpdesk Managers control
User availability
User enabled status
Ticket assignment limits
The report will also show the current count of assigned tickets of specific transition status types. This is an ad hoc report, useful for day to day management of Agent ticket assignment load.
From this report Helpdesk Managers can:
- See the current ticket count per transition status type
- Enable or disable users for ticket assignment
- Set user availability
- Edit ticket assignment limits