Ticket Round Robins

A common use for helpdesk automation is to assign tickets to agents. Round robins are a way to assign incoming tickets evenly to a queue of agents; each new ticket is assigned to the next agent in the queue.

Round robins don’t assign tickets directly. When you create a round robin, an associated Set Assigned Agent from Round Robin action becomes available. You have to create a trigger or other automation to run that action before any tickets will be assigned.

The first time this action runs, the ticket that caused it to run is assigned to the first agent in the round robin. The next time the action runs, the ticket that caused it to run is assigned to the next agent in the queue, and so on. When the end of the queue is reached, assignment loops back to the first agent, then goes back through the list.

The advantage of this is that tickets are always assigned as soon as they come in, and agents don’t get to choose the easy-looking tickets to solve.

If you select Only assign to agents that are online, the round robin queue will only assign tickets to agents who are logged in to the agent interface, and skip any others. This is useful if you only want to assign tickets to agents who are available to respond straight away. Disable this option if your agents reply via email and don’t use the agent interface, or if you want to assign tickets to agents whether or not they are logged in.

Note that you can have different triggers/SLAs/escalations that all use the same round robin. In this case, there is still only one queue, shared between the different automations.

To create and use a simple round robin:

1. Go to Tickets > Round Robin.

2. Ensure that Enable Round Robin is selected.

3. Click Add and enter a Title for the round robin.

4. Choose whether the round robin only assigns tickets to agents that are online.

5. Select the agents.

   

6. Optionally, you can bulk-add the agents from a particular team or permission group or with access to a particular department.

   

   Note that this does not create an ongoing link: i.e. adding a team to a round robin then later adding an agent to that team does not add the agent to the round robin.

7. Drag agents to order them in the queue, if desired.

8. Click Save.

9. There will now be a matching Set Assigned Agent from Round Robin action available for use in triggers, escalations and SLAS.

   

10. Create a New Ticket trigger that sets the assigned action from the round robin for user-created tickets.

If you want the round robin to apply only to certain tickets, you can simply add more criteria to the trigger.

Chat Round Robins

Chat Round Robins allow you to automatically and evenly distribute live chats to agents.

The Chat Round Robins work a lot like the Ticket Round Robins feature but they just apply to live chats instead of tickets.

When live chats are initiated by users, the Chat Round Robins setting determines which agent will be assigned to that chat, removing all the administrative hassle associated with manual chat distribution.

Chat Round Robins can be configured from the Admin Interface under Admin > Chat > Round Robin.

Round Robins have several options for configuration, and you can enable multiple Round Robins to work with each other at the same time.

Routing type of each Chat Round Robin determines the way in which the Round Robin will assign tickets to agents:

• The ‘Round Robin’ routing type means chats will be assigned to each selected agent in that Round Robin, in consecutive order, one after another.

• The ‘Least utilized Round Robin’ routing type means chats will be assigned to each selected agent in that Round Robin - based upon their total activity time handling chats since they’ve been logged in. This means the agent who has spent the least time handling chats is the first to be automatically assigned any new, incoming chat.

You can also determine the agents that are included in each Round Robin. These can be determined individually, or agents can be bulk added by team, department or permission group.

Round Robins can be set to be applied as default across all live chats or applied only to specific chat departments. This means you can set up a ‘universal’ Round Robin for all live chats, with any department-specific Round Robins that are enabled overriding the rules of the ‘universal’ Round Robin.