Assignment

Enterprise feature (1.19.0, helpdesk). See the Helpdesk overview.

Desk settings → Assignment decides who owns a new ticket. It has three parts: each team’s settings, the rules that run first, and each team’s on-call rota.

Who sets it up. Team leads (Manage people in their teams) change their own teams’ settings and rotas; managers and admins change every team’s. The rules need the Automations capability.

The order on a new ticket:

1. An alert or API ticket is first deduplicated (see Integrations): a repeat becomes a note on the open ticket and is never assigned again.
2. The assignment rules run in order, then the team’s mode.
3. Automations run, and may still change the team or the owner.
4. The notices go out: the new owner gets Assigned to me, and the team’s New in my teams goes out only when nobody was assigned.

A ticket is also assigned again when it moves to another team or reopens. When nobody can take a ticket yet (everyone is busy, away or off shift), it waits in the queue and is tried again every minute.

Team settings

Pick a mode for each team:

Mode	New tickets
Manual (the default)	Wait in the team’s queue. Agents take them, or a lead assigns them.
Round robin	Go to the next person in turn. People with a higher weight get more turns.
Load balanced	Go to whoever has the fewest open tickets right now.

Then choose who takes tickets:

• Their availability: Available only (the default), or Available or away. Offline people never get new tickets.
• Roles: which desk roles take tickets (Agent and Team lead by default; add Newbie or Manager if you like).
• Most open tickets per person: a cap, counting their open tickets in every team, including ones waiting on the requester. Empty means no limit.
• Only during the team’s office hours: outside them, tickets wait in the queue (on by default).
• Same person as last time: a requester’s new ticket goes to whoever solved their last one, when that person can take it.
• Move tickets on when their owner is away: when the owner has been Away or Offline for 10 minutes, their open tickets are assigned again.
• Move a ticket on when its owner hasn’t replied within a number of business minutes in the team’s calendar, from when it was assigned. Empty means never.

A ticket is moved on automatically at most 3 times; after that it stays with its owner until someone moves it by hand.

People in the team each have a weight (1 to 10), which gives them more turns in round robin or a bigger share in load balancing, and can be paused: a paused person keeps their tickets but gets no new ones.

Pausing yourself

An agent can Pause auto-assign for themselves from the availability menu in the desk’s top bar (“Stop getting new tickets by turn, stay available”): new tickets skip them until they turn it off. It is in the audit log like a lead’s pause.

Assignment rules

Rules send particular tickets to particular people or ways of assigning, before the team’s mode: “alerts from monitoring go to Infra, round robin among the people on shift; VIP requests go to a team lead”. New assignment rule takes a name, conditions and an action. Rules run in the order listed, and can be reordered.

Conditions (All or Any must be true; no conditions means every ticket):

Group	Fields
Ticket	Came in through (Get help, email, alert, API, a document, …), Sender is automated, Integration, Request type, Team, Priority, Category, Tags, Ticket language (1.19.2)
Words	Subject, First message, Subject or first message (comma-separated words)
Requester	Requester’s department, Requester’s office, Requester is a VIP
When	The team’s office hours (open or closed)
Answers	Any question in the request type’s form

with tests such as is, is not, is any of, is none of, contains any of, contains none of, is empty, is not empty, yes and no.

Actions (Assign to, a card for each choice):

• The team’s turn (before 1.19.2, Use the team’s setting), An agent with the right skills or language (1.19.2, see below), A specific person, Round robin in the team, Least busy in the team, Whoever is on call, or Leave it in the queue.
• Optionally Move to team first, add tags, and Set the priority, to a fixed priority or from an alert’s severity (Critical is Urgent, High is High, Warning is Normal, Info is Low).
• Only people who are at least a given desk role: Agent, Team lead or Manager (“VIP and urgent work can need a team lead”).
• Stop here when this rule matches. Off, the rules below still run, and a later match can change the owner.

Test a ticket explains which rule would match a made-up ticket (“CPU high on web-01”) and where it would go. Nothing is changed. From 1.19.2 it also shows the ticket’s language and where it came from, and, for a skills rule, who matches and what happens if nobody can take it.

Skills and languages

From 1.19.2, tag agents with what they know and the languages they speak under Desk settings → Skills and languages, and every ticket gets a language (see Skills and languages). Rules can then use them:

• The condition Ticket language (is, is not, is empty, is not empty), from the languages added under Skills and languages.
• The action An agent with the right skills or language (“Among available agents of the team, in turn”):
  • Speaks: any language, the ticket’s language (each ticket’s own), or a language you name. A named language must be added under Skills and languages first.
  • and knows: up to ten skills, each added with Skill. The agent must know every one.
  • Nobody matching available? Fall back to the team’s turn or Wait in the queue for a match.

The editor shows who matches today: “2 agents match today: Ana Kowalski, Marie Bernard.”, with anyone who matches but can’t take tickets right now under Not available now.

How the agent is picked. Only people who could take the ticket by turn are considered: in the team, available, not paused, on shift, under the team’s cap and in the roles the team (and the rule’s Only people who are at least) allows. Among those who match, the ticket goes to whoever has waited longest since their last assignment, or to the least busy in a load-balanced team. With Same person as last time on, the person who solved the requester’s last ticket still comes first when they match. The team’s round robin is unaffected: a skills pick never moves the team’s turn, so the next ticket by turn goes to whoever was next anyway.

When nobody matches. With Fall back to the team’s turn, the team’s mode decides (in a team assigned by hand, the ticket waits in the queue). With Wait in the queue for a match, the ticket waits and is tried again every minute, still for a matching agent.

• A rule that needs the ticket’s language while the ticket’s language is unknown counts only the skills. With no skills listed, the team’s turn decides.
• A rule or waiting ticket that names a skill or language deleted since falls back to the team’s turn.
• Skills don’t apply when a ticket is moved on because its owner is away or hasn’t replied: those still use the team’s turn.

Assignment history shows a skills pick as Skills and language.

On call

Each team can have an on-call rota: the people in turn, how long each turn lasts (1 to 28 days), the handover time and the rota’s time zone, and the date of the first handover. Each turn starts at the handover time in the rota’s time zone, even across clock changes. The page shows On call now (and until when) and The next four weeks.

Cover stands in for the rota between two times: a swap, a holiday, a sick day. Rules that assign to Whoever is on call use the rota and its cover; with nobody on call, the ticket stays in the queue.

Assignment history

Every assignment is recorded on the ticket, with an internal note, under Assignment history: who got it, when, and how (Rule, Round robin, Load balanced, Same as last time, By hand, Automation, Owner away, No first reply, On call or, from 1.19.2, Skills and language).

In the audit log

Action	Shown as
helpdesk.assignment.team_updated	Changed a team’s auto-assignment (its settings, or a member’s weight)
helpdesk.assignment.member_paused	Paused or resumed auto-assignment for an agent (by a lead, or themselves)
helpdesk.assignment.rule_created / .rule_updated / .rule_deleted	Created / Edited / Deleted an assignment rule
helpdesk.assignment.rules_reordered	Reordered assignment rules
helpdesk.assignment.on_call_updated	Changed a team’s on-call rota (the rota or its cover)