Round Robin assignment

I've seen this used in workflow solutions where workload balancing needs to be managed. Typically, a count of how many active 'items' each member has is used to determine who to allocate next.

I'd imagine that the rules engine could be readily used as a component to implement such functionality and provide further sophistication to target the most suitable agents based on skill sets. 

Here's a link to an interesting method to manually help decide on allocation from Chris Busse (as spotted by Justin Flitter Zendesk Evangelists

on http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=113452)

http://www.chrisbusse.com/blog/tabid/55/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/39/How-to-create-a-custom-Backlog-by-Person-report-for-Zendesk.aspx

Chris is able to use trend reporting to get a visual sense of loading between agents. This includes uneven loading that reflects real world business scenarios.

David's point about the issues around push or pull allocation show that despite technology, the human phycology side plays a significant part.

Thanks for the advice and links Graham!  You're right, ticket assigment is often done in more sophisticated ways in many help desk environmnets.  And Chris' article is very interesting and shows a nice approach to a "fair" assignment algorithm, especially for a larger or back-logged help desk.  But, I would actually be satisfied with something a little simpler (at least in version1) with my key interest, as you know, being that the *assignment* task take place automatically in some way (no human involved).

Thanks for the tips!

Hey Guys,

This sounds like a great idea. There's potentially a few problems we would need to figure out solutions to (some upcoming feature and underlying processes not visible to yourselves, as well as general workflow) but ultimately it's a good idea.

No promises on whether I can get back to you, but I'll be passing this to Development for further discussion.

Jake Holman
Zendesk Support

Totally agree that some sort of auto-distribution to support agents is a very important feature - otherwise our 10 or so support agents can easily cross-post each other when new issues come in. We're currently using TenderApp, but considering switching to Zendesk. Was hoping to find that feature, may not make the switch until you have it.

We're currently using a program that automatically assigns approximately 10 emails from the queue to individual agents. This works really well for us, a team of 15+ agents.

We are in a Zendesk trial period right now and this is a bit of a problem. I'd rather not have someone spend time assigning out emails to different agents. Any other suggestions or workarounds for this issue? 

@jake is there any update on the round robin functionality? Currently evaluating Zendesk but the lack of round robin and SMS notification is really working against it.

Hi Guys, came across the need for this feature too. I'm glad I'm not the only one that needed it! Hope it can be in place soon

Even if we can get the capability of updating triggers and automation through the rest API we can implement our own solution. Right now the REST API is very primitive and does not allow updating anything other than the tickets.

@Hatim: Primitive? Not sure I can agree when you're able to also action on Users, Organizations, Groups, Attachments, Users, Tags, Forums (and their Topics) and now even Ticket Fields and Macros now.

@Nakkiran (and others!): There's no update on the functionality at the moment. There's a few other key things that need implementing before this, otherwise it would make everything far more complex than it needs to be. Those are close to completion, so we'll review again soon.

Though the list of items you currently cover seems long without automation, trigger and report update capability in the Rest api it seems quite incomplete there is no way to implement the missing scenario like routing of tickets, changing escalation paths etc..