Round Robin assignment

I've been looking into a way to auto-assign tickets to agents as well. Preferably in a round-robin type method. Seeing as the last update here was in January, can we get a status update on auto-assigning tickets as they are created to a the next person in a custom list of technicians?

The ability to have a round robin or auto assign would be very useful in our situation where we have a small group working in our support department.  The ability to have a button that would auto assign either 3 or 5 tickets to a support member when their queue is empty would help keep agents from 'Cherry Picking' the easy emails out of the queue.  If everyone is pulling the same numbers, the reports can be more useful, as well.

Jake, It's been one year (less a week) since you last mentioned the round-robin functionality, and that we could review it again after some other things were implemented. I'm wondering where this one stands. 

We are currently in the evaluation phase of Zendesk.

We are blown away by all of the forethought and functionality built-in, how easy it is to set up & use, and its overall intuitiveness.

That being said, the lack of automated ticket distribution is, by far, the largest hurdle we're trying to get through, in order to switch to this product - It is shocking how much advanced functionality is present with Zendesk, and yet, this basic functionality is absent.

We have used ticket handling as Zendesk currently uses, in the past, through our email channel, where agents were simply instructed to pull oldest messages when they had availability. As you can guess, only the "easy" tickets were being handled quickly, and the ticket queue only tended to only grow larger, rather than shrink.

Even with round-robin style ticketing distribution, there is some room for disproportional workload. There are different ticket complexities, each agent may have varying workloads with other channels, and agents who are out of the office could be getting work piled on them, and find a mountain of cases to handle upon their return. (Meanwhile, customers would be forced to wait until they return for any kind of response.)

But it would at least be a step in the right direction for automated distribution.

I would like to mention another possible distribution method, based on agent utilization:

• Our current workflow for incoming cases is set up with an algorithm in our ticketing system, and is based on agent utilization. 
• If “Agent A” is showing active task minutes as 120 and “Agent B” is showing task minutes as 110, Agent B will receive the next incoming case. (Even if Agent A is showing fewer cases, a longer “available” time in the queue, etc.) 
• This system allows for even distribution of actual time spent working, rather than even distribution of tickets.

Initially we had some complaints from our agents, but after explaining how the system worked, (and how it is much harder to manipulate to dodge undesirable tasks) it has drastically reduced dishonesty and improved overall productivity and morale. It is nice to no longer have to "babysit" staff, and we have eliminated a lot of temptation to be lazy.

Whether you decide to implement a system that uses agent utilization to automate ticket distribution or not, please consider any kind of automated ticketing system - it is vital to larger support teams who handle all the same products.

I would be very interested to hear a status update on this feature request.

Round robin assignment and only assigning to available (logged in as "simple" option or even better the ability for agents to mark themselves available for their business day to provide global coverage) is very high on our requirement list as we build out our support organization.

Regards

Graham

We would love this functionality for our incoming tickets via email and dropbox, as well as incoming chats via the integrated Zendesk chat client. 

Even distribution = happy support agents = happy supervisors :)

Thanks for your attention on this Jake!

I should say, per David's original comment:

automated even distribution = happy support agents = happy supervisors :)

+1 for this functionality - automated distribution to specific group would be awesome

+1 for this functionality