Automatic assignment methods for requests

Audience:

person

•

Version: 10.5

• 4 minutes to read

For a request to be your responsibility, your name must appear in the request's Owner field. This can be set manually, for example when the request is created. But it may also be the result of automatic assignment of requests. Such assignment depends on the category the request belongs to, and the assignment method specified for this category.

Assignment methods

Method	Description
Even assignment	Assigns requests evenly among the members of the category.
Weighted assignment	Assigns requests based on the weightings specified for members of the category.
To user with fewest open requests	Assigns new requests to the category members who has the fewest active requests.
Do not assign	Does not assign requests to specific request handlers, but puts all requests in a queue as Unassigned.

Let us illustrate these assignment methods with three users and three incoming requests.

Request assignment methods -screenshot

Even

Assigns requests evenly among category members in a round-robin fashion.

Request assignment methods, even -screenshot

Weighted

Assigns requests based on specified weightings for each category member. For example, if member A has a weight of 1, member B has 2, and member C has 5, over 8 requests, they will be assigned proportionally.

Requests are assigned probabilistically based on their weights.

Request assignment methods, weighted

Request	Random value	Assigned to
First request	7	Member C
Second request	2	Member B
Third request	5	Member C

Request assignment methods, weighted -screenshot

User with fewest open requests

Assigns new requests to the member with the fewest active requests.

Request	Condition	Assigned to
First request	Members B and C have the fewest requests	Member C
Second request	Member B has the fewest requests	Member B
Third request	All members have the same number of requests	Member B

Request assignment methods, user with fewest open requests -screenshot

Do not assign

Does not assign requests to specific members. All requests are placed in a queue by default.

Request assignment methods, do not assign -screenshot

Get next request in queue: If the queue system is set up for your company, you can click this option to get the next unassigned request in the queue for the category you belong to.

Specify assignment method for category

A request handler with category administration rights can specify the assignment method for categories:

Go to Settings and maintenance.
Select Requests > Categories.
Select the required category.
Select the Assignment method tab.
Select the appropriate options.
Click OK.

Example

Imagine that your company has created a category for each department in the company: User support, Sales, Accounts, and so on. And you have also specified that all emails sent to support@company.com should be automatically assigned to the "User support" category. All the staff in the user support department are members of this category. For this category they have set the Even assignment method. This means that all the members of the category will get the same number of requests, and each of the members will continuously receive new requests in their Own open requests screen. If, alternatively, they had selected the Do not assign method, the members would have had to go into the Unassigned requests screen themselves to take ownership of new requests.