By default, when a request arrives, it has no assignee and it is assumed that the agent will pick it up himself or a senior manager will assign an agent.

However, it is possible to set up the system itself and it will assign requests automatically to a less busy agent.

 

Let's take a closer look at the possibilities of setting up the auto assignment with the Dispatcher and create a rule:

 

In the "Mandatory conditions" you must specify the trigger for the rule to be triggered.

For example, if we select "New request" as a trigger, the system will launch the rule at each new request receipt.

 

In the "Additional conditions" you can set the conditions that would limit our trigger, for example, by specifying the department. Then the rule will be triggered when a new request comes to the specified department.

 

There are several assignment options in the "Actions" block, which we will consider in details by examples:

• Change the assignee.
• Change the assignee to a less busy one taking into account the assignment interval.
• Change the assignee to the previous one by parameters.

 

In most actions a group of agents is specified. Please note that the specified group of agents must have accesses to the Departments that receive the requests for further assignment. And other selected conditions must be met, such as the status  "Online" of agent at the time of assignment.

 

If at the time of starting the rule the system could not find assignee according to the specified parameters, for most actions the assignment process will continue for one hour, 4 times a minute.

 

1) Change the assignee.

 

When selecting the action, it is possible to choose not only a particular agent as the assignee, but also change assignee to:

• Unassigned - leave the request unassigned by specifying additional conditions: You can leave a part of requests in the system unassigned.
• Previous assignee, who dealt with the previous question/request of the client.
• Author of the last reply - when it is necessary to reassign the requests to the users who were the last to reply to them.
• Author of the last internal note;
• Author of the last status - agent that has last changed the status of the request. This option of distribution can be used not for new requests, but for the processing of old ones.
• Creator of request - the system returns the request to the agent who created it. It is used for assignment internal tasks among agents.

 

2) Change the assignee to a less busy one taking into account the assignment interval.

 

Requests are assigned among the agents of a selected group or groups taking into account the set time (assignment interval) and agent's status. Specify the maximum number of requests processed by the operator, their statuses and sources. Also mark the limitation for a certain status of requests that will not fall under the auto assignment.

When the request comes into the system, it goes to the assignment queue, from old to new requests. Deletion from the queue occurs only in the following cases:

• status of the request has been changed to the "At the time of distribution, the status of the request is not equal" condition;
• request has been deleted;
• request has been frozen;
• agent has been assigned to the request;
• distribution action is deleted from the rule;
• rule is deleted/disabled;

If agents have the same number of requests and it is less than the maximum number of requests according to the action conditions, the request will be randomly assigned.

There is the "Assignment queue" button, which opens a window with the actual information about the assignment queue, including:

• subject of the request;
• request ID;
• assignment start time;
• date of creation/modification.

and users involved in the request:

• filter by group;
• status;
• the number of requests (click on it to open the list)
• user name.

 

3) Change the assignee to the previous one by parameters.

 

It is convenient practice, for example, when clients often come with additional questions after a while, the request will go to the same agent that helped them before. This reduces the time required for an agent to explore the problem, as they are already aware of what questions the client had previously addressed. On the screenshot you can see the time when less than a day has passed from the last agent's reply.