Automatic call assignment

One of the charms of service automation is that it automates tasks that are simple, repetitive, and often pretty boring. TOPdesk’s new Automatic call assignment feature helps you automate a part of your incident management process, freeing up your team’s time for more interesting work.

Who benefit from the automatic assignment feature?

Operator groups with a big volume of simple tasks that require quick resolutions, and where there is a dispatcher to assign tasks to the operators could benefit from this feature. This way the responsibility of assignment is taken off of the dispatcher who can spend their time with other, more valuable tasks, but can still monitor the processes on the well-known platforms and intervene when necessary.

For who is this feature relevant?

The automatic assignment feature is mainly interesting for two types of teams:

1. Dispatchers within operator groups. This feature would lighten the load for dispatchers who manually assign incidents in operator groups to specific operators. With the automatic assignment feature, the assignment task is taken off of the dispatcher who can spend their time on other, more valuable tasks. At the same time, dispatchers can still monitor the workload via the usual functionalities, such as reports, selections and overviews and intervene when necessary.
2. Operator groups without a dispatcher. Many organizations don’t have a dispatcher: operators regularly check which new incidents have been assigned to their group and assign it to themselves. What might be a problem here is that it can take a while before an incident is picked up by an operator. Automatic assignment of incidents decreases duration and response time for incidents. Also, it makes sure that everyone gets their fair share of simple, complex, fun and boring tasks.

What does the feature do?

The feature automatically assigns first line incidents that are put onto an operator group to a specific operator. Here’s how it works on a technical level.

Automatic assignment is available for first line incidents. When enabled, the feature will allow you to set automatic assignment per operator group. TOPdesk will scan these groups every minute to check if there are assignable incidents, and also check if there are available operators. TOPdesk will then assign incidents to available operators, and will keep doing this until all assignable incidents have been assigned.

What do we mean by ‘assignable’ incidents?

‘Assignable’ incidents are all first line incidents that are:

• Assigned to a group for which auto-assignment has been enabled.
• Not closed.
• Not yet assigned to an operator.

What do we mean by ’available’ operators?

An operator will be considered ‘available’ when:

• They are members of an operator group for which auto-assignment has been enabled.
• They have the task ‘first line incident operator’ checked on their operator card.
• They have read and write permissions on first line incidents.

How does TOPdesk decide which operator to assign an incident to?

TOPdesk follows a ‘round robin’ principle for assigning incidents. It assigns an assignable incident to the first available operator of the operator group, the second incident to the second available operator, and so forth. When all operators have been assigned an incident, the next incident will be assigned again to the first operator.

When automatically assigning incidents, – it does not take into account priority, or filters for branch, category or operator.

How does this affect operators who are members of multiple groups?

To ease the workload on operators who belong to multiple operator groups, we have added a limiting option to the feature. This option allows you to set the maximum number of incidents that can be assigned to operators of a group.

How to enable automatic assignment?

The feature automatic assignment can be enabled under Settings > Module Settings > Call Management > First line calls.

For each operator group for which you wish to enable automatic assignment, you enable it on the Operator group card.