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After setting up Work Schedules for my users, I expected ticket auto assignment to only assign tickets to agents based on their availability in their work schedule but it does not seem to be working. The configurations I made were:

 

  • Create Business hours for the Agent Group (8a - 8p EST)
  • Create Business hours for each shift (Early Shift 8a - 5p EST & Late Shift 11a - 8P)
  • Created Agent Group with business hours set to the Agent Group hours, turned on Auto-assignment and added users.
  • Created Work Schedules for each shift with their business hours set to their appropriate business hours.
  • Added the appropriate agents to each Work Schedule.

 

The result is that all agents in the Agent Group still get assigned all the time regardless of the Work Schedule they are associated to.

 

Did I miss something in the configuration?

 

Great question and this is certainly something I have not yet implemented as it is a bit daunting.

Conceptually what I think is probably needed to round all this off is a set of Conditions in your existing Workflow Automations that deal with Ticket assignments which allows Freshservice to compare the current ‘Created Date’ of a Ticket against your various Business Hours.

Workflows can certainly leverage Business Hours in Conditions:

A few features might be missing currently to aid with making this as hands-off as possible:

  • the ability for Agent’s Auto-Assign status to be automatically turned on and off based on Business Hours
  • the ability for individual Agents Auto-Assign status to be synced with their Calendar (example: when they are on leave)
  • warn (or even prevent) Agents when they manually assign Tickets to Agents/Agent Groups who are not available and/or perhaps the Ticket they are being assigned will breach before that Agent/Agent Group becomes available

 


Great question and this is certainly something I have not yet implemented as it is a bit daunting.

Conceptually what I think is probably needed to round all this off is a set of Conditions in your existing Workflow Automations that deal with Ticket assignments which allows Freshservice to compare the current ‘Created Date’ of a Ticket against your various Business Hours.

Workflows can certainly leverage Business Hours in Conditions:

A few features might be missing currently to aid with making this as hands-off as possible:

  • the ability for Agent’s Auto-Assign status to be automatically turned on and off based on Business Hours
  • the ability for individual Agents Auto-Assign status to be synced with their Calendar (example: when they are on leave)
  • warn (or even prevent) Agents when they manually assign Tickets to Agents/Agent Groups who are not available and/or perhaps the Ticket they are being assigned will breach before that Agent/Agent Group becomes available

 

 

A bit of programming to have the auto-assignment look to see if an agent that is part of the agent group has a business schedule associated and if they are, use the business hours associated to that schedule to determine availability should be pretty straightforward. After looking into this a bit more, the workflow automation won’t work as I have a customer with overlapping work schedules and there is a 6 hours where agents from both shifts are available to have tickets assigned to them and they are all part of the same agent group. 


Perhaps give this a try as a workaround?

  1. Create the following Business Hours sets called ‘Shift 1’ & ‘Shift 2’ or something that aren’t linked to any Agent Groups with the hours ‘8a - 2p’ & ‘2p - 8p’ so that there is no overlap.
     
  2. This can then be specifically leveraged by the Workflow Automator to decide whether Tickets go to an Early Shift or Late Shift Agent Group.

It’s not ideal but it could certainly help distribute workload based on Agent shifts.


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