When it comes to Service Management, ticket routing is a key step to ensure the request falls into the hands of the appropriate team to assess, prioritize, and solve it efficiently.
It is common to have difficulties to quickly and correctly route tickets, especially when you have to do it manually. But, as with many ITSM processes, the right software and automation are your best allies to avoid bottlenecks and get the process running smoothly. Not only will it save you time, it will also ensure that tickets aren’t left unattended for too long.
In this article, we will explore what ticket routing is, its main benefits, and some possible challenges to look out for. Finally, we will see how you can easily automate it on InvGate Service Management.
Let’s dive in!
What is ticket routing?
Ticket routing is the process of assigning incoming IT support requests to the appropriate team based on factors like issue type, urgency, and required expertise.
While the logic behind routing can be defined manually, the process is often handled by a system that uses predefined rules or automation to direct tickets efficiently.
The goal is to connect each request with someone equipped to resolve it, helping IT teams stay organized, avoid overload, and deliver faster support.
4 ticket routing benefits
As we've seen, efficient ticket routing offers several benefits to organizations and their IT teams work processes. Let's look at some of them in more detail:
- Improving customer satisfaction: When tickets are accurately routed, response times are lower and customers are more satisfied. Improved customer experience will help boost loyalty and retention rates.
- Increasing efficiency and productivity: While manual ticket routing leads to reduced productivity, automation can free up IT teams and get them to focus on more complex tasks.
- Reducing Ticket Escalation: A well-built routing will help make sure that the right agent is attending to the request, which will reduce your Escalation Rate.
- Improving collaboration: A centralized platform for tracking and managing customer inquiries can facilitate collaboration both within and between teams, giving them a chance to learn from each other and improve their work.
How to automate ticket routing with InvGate Service Management
Having the right tool will give you a huge advantage when it comes to ITSM practices. InvGate Service Management is an all-round solution that can help you easily and quickly automate your ticket routing and assignment processes. Now, let's see how it's done.
1. Route requests through team assignments
The foundation of automated routing in InvGate Service Management is the Help Desk structure. Before configuring any rules, create the help desks that will own different types of work under Settings → Help Desks.
You can organize help desks however your operation is structured. Some organizations create one for each support team (IT, HR, Facilities), while others separate them by support tier, business unit, or location. Each help desk also lets you choose one of InvGate's built-in assignment methods to determine how tickets are distributed among its agents.
The methods include:
- Round Robin - Assigns tickets automatically to the next available agent in a sequence.
- Workload - Assigns tickets automatically based on the agent's current workload.
- Smart Request Assignment: AI analyzes each request and automatically selects the optimal agent based on their experience, availability, and workload.
- Free - Instead of automatically assigning tickets, agents pick up the tickets out of a queue.
Once your help desks are in place, connect them to your service catalog. Under Settings → Catalog, each request category has a Default Help Desk setting that determines where requests of that type will be sent.
For example, you might configure:
- Password reset → IT Service Desk
- New hardware request → Workplace IT
- Employee onboarding → HR Operations
- Building maintenance → Facilities
When users submit requests through the self-service portal, InvGate automatically routes each ticket to the help desk associated with that catalog category. For many organizations, this simple mapping covers most routing needs without any additional configuration.
2. Add conditional routing rules
Some request categories need more than a single destination. For those cases, InvGate lets you define routing conditions directly within the catalog category.
Click the edit button on the request category and go to the Rules tab. There, you can keep the Default Help Desk as the fallback destination while creating conditions that send tickets to a different help desk when specific criteria are met.
For example, you could route:
- High-priority incidents to an escalation help desk.
- Requests submitted by executives or VIP users to a dedicated support team.
- Tickets from a specific office to the corresponding regional help desk.
- Requests with certain form responses or custom field values to specialized teams.
The rules are evaluated automatically when the request is submitted, allowing a single catalog item to route tickets differently depending on the information provided by the requester. That gives you more flexibility without requiring duplicate request categories in your service catalog.
Furthermore, InvGate offers two AI features to help support agents that go beyond static routing rules.
- Smart request escalation: A feature that helps teams stay ahead of SLA risks. It continuously monitors tickets in progress and compares them against historical data to detect which ones are likely to breach their SLA. When a risk is identified, it triggers escalation suggestions so teams can proactively intervene before deadlines are missed. The result is greater SLA compliance, reduced manual tracking, and fewer surprises for both IT and end users.
- Expert collaboration suggestion: This feature helps you connect tickets to people who’ve successfully handled similar issues before. It identifies the most relevant collaborators for a given ticket by analyzing the issue’s context, the skills of available agents, and historical satisfaction scores. It’s especially useful for complex or cross-departmental requests that don’t fit neatly into a single queue.
3. Send requests directly into a workflow
Some request types involve multiple approvals, fulfillment tasks, or handoffs. Instead of routing them only to a support team, you can configure a service to launch a workflow automatically when a request is submitted.
For example, an employee onboarding request can immediately start a workflow that creates tasks for HR, IT, and Facilities, while an access request can begin an approval process before reaching the fulfillment team.
Routing requests into workflows is useful when the goal isn't simply to deliver a ticket to the right team, but to initiate a standardized process that coordinates work across multiple stakeholders.
6 ways to improve ticket routing
Even with automation in place, ticket routing needs regular attention. Teams change, services evolve, and support volumes fluctuate over time. Reviewing the following areas can help you identify where your current process is falling short and what to improve next.
- Too many tickets are routed manually. If agents spend part of their day forwarding requests to the right team, look for patterns you can automate. Start with your highest-volume request categories, then add rules for special cases like urgent incidents, VIP users, or location-based support.
- Users don't provide enough information. Routing decisions are only as good as the data collected when a ticket is submitted. Review your request forms and make sure they ask for the details that actually determine ownership, such as the affected service, department, office, or device.
- Request categories don't match your support structure. When users struggle to choose the right category, tickets are more likely to land in the wrong queue. Keep your service catalog organized, remove outdated categories, and make sure each request type has a clear owner.
- Routing rules no longer reflect how teams work. Support responsibilities change over time, but routing rules often stay the same. Periodically review your automation to confirm tickets are still reaching the right help desk, team, or support tier.
- Escalation depends on individual knowledge. Some tickets will always require another team's expertise. Define when a ticket should be escalated, who takes ownership, and how information is handed off so the process doesn't rely on agents knowing who to contact.
- You don't measure routing performance. If you aren't tracking how often tickets are reassigned or transferred between teams, it's difficult to know whether your routing is effective. Reviewing those metrics regularly helps uncover gaps in your service catalog and opportunities to refine your routing rules.
Wrapping up
Correct ticket routing is a critical part of any well-functioning service desk, as it helps ensure that customer inquiries are directed to the right team or agent. However, managing this process manually is time-consuming and inefficient.
Automating ticket routing is the best way to streamline the process. You can do so with InvGate Service Management to reduce response times, improve team morale, and overall customer experience.
To start automating your ticket routing right away, ask for a 30-day free trial!
