Automatic ticket assignment is one of the simplest yet most useful features of a help desk software. It keeps work moving and spreads it evenly across your team — which is good for both service quality and your agents' peace of mind.
For service desk managers, setting it up comes down to two things: knowing what your service desk needs, and knowing what your IT Service Management tool can do. Once you have both, picking the right assignment rule is straightforward.
In this quick guide, you'll see:
- Why automatic ticket assignment matters.
- The three assignment rules.
- Examples of when each one fits.
3 Rules to Automate Ticket Routing
Key takeaways:
There are three general ways to auto-assign tickets at a help desk: Round robin, Workload, and Free. Pick the one that fits based on:
- The workload of your agents.
- The number of available agents.
- The agents’ locations and working hours.
- Your SLAs.
- Any data or ticket context.
Automatic ticket assignment: A step towards efficiency
Assigning tickets manually is very time-consuming. It requires the service desk manager to always be attentive to incoming tickets, making it hard to fully concentrate on other, more valuable tasks.
This not only lacks efficiency but can also negatively affect the quality of customer support. A manual assignment of tickets can prevent resolving incidents and fulfilling requests on time.
But, as with every repetitive task, it can be automated! Especially in a fast-paced environment, auto-assigning tickets is a lifesaver. By applying a simple rule, new tickets are automatically assigned to an available agent as soon as they're created.
How does ticket auto assignment work?
We already know that automatic ticket assignment is a process that assign incoming tickets to the appropriate agents or teams based on predefined rules.
Instead of manually assigning tickets, this method ensures that requests are routed quickly and efficiently to the right agents, enabling immediate attention to customer issues.
This system relies on various criteria such as agent availability, skillsets, and team structures to make sure that support tickets are sent to agents who are best suited to resolve them.
Let's explore three of the most common ways to assign tickets automatically.
Ticket assignment process: Three rules to auto-assign tickets
There are three basic ticket assignment rules. Their main difference is in the logic for how to divide the workload.
1. Round robin ticket assignment
Round robin is a type of ticket assignment automation where new tickets are automatically appointed to the next available agent in a sequence.
If you choose this type of assignment rule, incoming tickets will be sequentially assigned. This ensures that all agents get an equal number of tickets over time.
Round robin comes in handy in situations like:
- Your service desk has a high amount of incoming tickets – Round robin will assign them automatically, avoiding bottlenecks and improving response times.
- You have a high number of agents – This method contributes to fairness since it distributes tickets equally.
- Team members have a day off – Customer support can work steadily regardless of absences.
This assignment method avoids cherry-picking where agents might only pick tickets out of the queue that are easy, quick or already resolved. Not that those tickets don’t need to be addressed, but it's a basic human tendency to take the easiest work first.
This is also a great assignment method when training and cross-training teams. Since no ticket, agent, or manager information or preference is taken into consideration this can be used to make sure agents get a variety of topics and requests.
2. Workload ticket assignment
The second rule of automatic ticket assignment is based on the agents’ current workload. In this case, new tickets are distributed based on the number of tickets already assigned to their colleagues. The person with the least number of open tickets will get the next one.
This assignment rule capitalizes on the performance of your service desk. Assigning tickets to the agent with the lowest number of open tickets makes the response time a priority. Also, it helps to distribute the workload evenly among all agents.
Workload assignment can be particularly useful when ticket effort varies greatly - so that if ticket effort is approaching days or weeks, agents with those long running tasks can focus on resolving them while not getting distracted or stressed out about new work.
3. Free ticket assignment
The last assignment rule inverts the roles. It’s not the software that automatically divides work based on workload anymore. Here, agents pick up the tickets out of a queue. So, this flexibility allows them to choose which tickets they want to work on.
Although it might sound like it leaves room for agents to be picky, a free ticket assignment can make sense in scenarios such as:
- A limited number of agents – If you had only a couple of agents divided into different working hours to provide 24/7 support, it would make sense for them to take the tickets according to their workload and response capability.
- Collaborative teams – They will benefit from this assignment method particularly if they are in contact with each other often.
- Mature teams – Escalation levels or teams with long tenure will benefit from this method in that the work can be assigned based upon many factors. It could be personnel availability, specialization or access levels and authorization to complete the work.
This can turn out to be a useful assignment rule to encourage your team’s productivity. If this is your goal, make sure to oversee their work and apply some gamification methods to spice things up!
This can also be a good assignment style when staff is being trained, but early in their training. Perhaps they know the basics of managing tickets, but only a small set of topics they can effectively and confidently address.
It is recommended, however, that teams following this method for training assess assignment rules regularly.
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Leadership considerations for assignment rules
No matter which assignment rules you are using with your teams, it’s important to assess and understand the impact this has on your teams.
Assignment rules impact your agents’ ability to balance work with their personal lives, and they also affect their ability to perform their best work. Adjusting assignment rules impacts agent satisfaction, as well as team dynamics and a feeling of fairness in service and support teams.
Assignment rules with InvGate Service Management
We mentioned earlier that it’s essential to have help desk software that allows you to choose the best rule that fits your team. InvGate Service Management has the three ticket assignment engines listed above, and more options. Alongside round robin, workload, and free, you also get:
- Manager's decision: tickets aren't distributed automatically — the help desk manager reviews each request and assigns it to the agent they choose. Useful when routing needs human judgment, like a sensitive request or a VIP user.
- Smart assignment: AI reads each incoming request and routes it to the agent best suited to handle it, weighing their experience, current availability, and workload. It's part of InvGate Service Management's AI Hub, and it's built to take routine assignment decisions off coordinators' plates while keeping the load balanced across the team.
There are other options too: workflows can set either the team or the individual assignment based on ticket type, keywords, users, or any detail in the ticket itself. And our automations feature assesses ticket values throughout their lifecycle to assign the team or agent directly — it can also add team leads and managers to tickets based on priority, user groups, or any other data point.
Ready to put this into practice? You can try InvGate Service Management at no cost for 30 days.
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