In addition to bringing agents together and controlling access privileges, groups can also be used to assign incoming tickets and requests to different agents that are part of it. This can either be done manually in a more targeted way and also automatically without any intervention from a dedicated manager who is taking care of requests. 

Usually, tickets are either assigned to a group or an agent individually. This is done by one of the members of the team or based on predefined rules or conditions created using Workflow Automator. For example, all your high impact queries can be assigned directly to one of the experienced agents in your team, and tickets that come in during the night can be assigned to people in that shift.


However, note that when a ticket gets assigned to a group, it does NOT mean that it was assigned to an agent in the group (either randomly or by any means). It just means that any of the agents in that group can assign it to themselves or have a supervisor do it for them.


Here are a couple of ways for you to automate this entire process.


Method 1: Automatically assign every ticket in Round Robin


The second method is simple and very easy to setup. For every group in your helpdesk, you can turn on the "Automatic Ticket Assignment" option and everything will take care of itself. The tickets will get distributed to all agents in the group, in a round-robin order. That way, every agent has an equal number of tickets to answer. 


All you need to do is go to Admin > User Management > Agent Groups. 
If your account has more than one workspace: 

To modify global workflows, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > User Management > Agent Groups

To modify workspace-level workflows, navigate to Admin > Workspace Settings > {Workspace Name} > User Management > Agent Groups

Now, open up the group for which you want to turn on round-robin assignment and click on the Automatic radio button.

You can find detailed instructions on how to do this here.





Turning on "Do-Not-Disturb" mode


Your tickets are now automatically assigned to the group and your job just became easier. But, there could be several instances when an agent might want to say no to more tickets, like while being preoccupied with an important ticket at hand, or while speaking to someone over the phone.


Available

Not Available


To make sure there is enough control on their side, Freshservice lets agents make themselves as "Available" and "Not Available" whenever they want. All they need to do is click on the Green icon on the top right corner of the screen, next to their profile picture. The icon will turn red indicating that they are not ready to take more tickets. 


Method 2: Auto-assigning tickets using Workflow Automator 


This method is particularly useful when you have a group of agents in your support team, each of whom works well in specific domains. It is sensible to create Workflows rules and give them tickets based on their expertise. You could assign tickets to them based on the subject or description of the ticket, looking up keywords from their area of expertise.



This is a great way to handle things when your support team is handicapped to handle only a few types of issues. It might be hard to set up depending upon the number of agents in the group because you will have to create specific Workflow rules manually. 

There will be no guarantee that your agents will have an equal number of tickets to resolve. But if you give it a little thought and time, you could pull out some auto-assign magic that has been fine-tuned to your team’s strengths.



Note: You need to use the Workflow Automator to initially assign tickets to the group, or do the same when you set up your support email. If not, the auto-assign feature will not work. This functionality only works with the round-robin function and doesn't exclude the agent from manually assigned tickets.