Ticket routing rules are essential in service management to ensure that incoming service requests or incidents are directed to the appropriate individuals or teams for resolution. These rules help optimize the workflow, improve efficiency, and ensure that tickets are handled by the right personnel based on various conditions.
Two key aspects of ticket routing rules are Conditions and Responsibilities.
Conditions
Criteria for Routing
Conditions define the criteria that must be met for a ticket to be routed in a particular way. These criteria can include various factors such as the type of request, priority level, category, and any custom fields relevant to the organization's workflow.
Real-world Condition Examples:
- If the ticket is categorized as a software issue, route it to the IT support team.
- If the priority is high, escalate the ticket to a senior support agent.
- If the ticket comes from a VIP customer, prioritize it and assign it to a specialized team.
Responsibilities
Assignment of Ownership
Responsibilities specify who is responsible for handling a ticket once it meets the specified conditions. This can include individual agents, support teams, or even automated systems.
Real-world Responsibility Examples:
- If the ticket is related to hardware issues, assign it to the hardware support team.
- If the ticket requires specialized knowledge, assign it to an agent with expertise in that area.
- If the ticket is from a specific customer, assign it to the dedicated account manager.
In summary, ticket routing rules are designed to automate and streamline the process of directing service requests or incidents to the right individuals or teams based on predefined conditions, optimizing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of service management.
Routing or Work Distribution Rules
Routing or work distribution rules help companies handle a high volume of tickets. While smaller organizations can assign a service agent to review each message to then create and assign tickets to the right person or team, this isn't an efficient model when hundreds, or even thousands of messages come in each day. As a result, a routing mechanism that automatically delivers the ticket to the right team or person can significantly increase efficiency. SAP Service Cloud includes a flexible, easy to configure routing rule definition engine.
The first step is to create the teams in the system within an organizational structure. Ticket routing rules can then be configured for the teams in the structure. In the following example, the IT support team is broken down into three further support teams, the software team, the hardware team, and the license team.
Examples of Routing Rules for a Service Organization:
- Any ticket from a particular customer routed to a specific team.
- Any ticket of a certain type or category to a specific team.
- Any ticket with the status 'Escalated' to a specific team.