Overview
You can create a rule that automatically assigns or routes tickets or conversations to a particular agent or team based on pretty much any criteria you can think of with Kayako's automation tools. Using triggers or monitors, you can instantly change the owner or assignee of a conversation the moment they come in. On the other hand, if you are wondering why a certain conversation was routed to someone who shouldn't be getting it, then the likelihood is a trigger or a monitor could have caused that.
Prerequisite
- To create a trigger or monitor in Kayako, you need an administrator account with the 'Manage automations' permission.
Information
Understanding How Assignment Automation Works
When it comes to streamlining your support processes, conversation assignments are often a good place to find some quick solutions. Between reviewing the queue, assessing individual conversations, and selecting appropriate assignments, your entire team can end up sinking a ton of time into the process. With Kayako's automation tools, you can instantly route certain conversations to certain agents or teams. That means less time spent deliberating and more time spent solving problems for your customers.
Using the condition selectors when you are building your automations, you can specify any subset of conversations you like, based on their organization, priority, tags, custom fields — you name it. That means that if you train your support team to assign conversations based on certain criteria, you can probably train Kayako to assign conversations using those very same criteria.
Note: For further evidence of the breadth of choices you have here, check out our automation reference guide for conditions and actions.
Once you have defined the criteria for your automation, there are two actions that will come in particularly handy when building assignment automations:
| Conversation: Assignee | For any monitor or trigger you create, you can use this action to assign the conversation to an individual user. When you are building a trigger, you will also have the Current User option. Selecting this option tells Kayako to assign the conversation to whoever performed the action that fired the trigger. |
| Conversation: Team | Alternatively, you can simply change the team on the conversation, which will add it to that team's view, if you have defined one. |
With these two actions, you can build all sorts of automatic routing to get the right conversations to the right people, super-fast.
Please check you’ve filled everything in correctly.Below are some example solutions you can use in controlling assignments with triggers and monitors so you can start routing your conversations automatically. Not only will this save you time, but it will make it much easier to ensure that none of your conversations fall through the cracks.
If you need help with the basics of building automations, check out our instructions on how to create triggers and monitors and our automation reference guide for conditions and actions (link above).
Solutions
Assigning Messenger Conversations Automatically as They Come In
If you are offering real-time support with Kayako Messenger, it is useful to set up a trigger to auto-assign all your Messenger conversations to teams, right when they start. To do this, you will create a trigger that will look for new Messenger conversations that do not have an assignee. That last part is important if you are proactively messaging customers, to make sure you are not inadvertently resetting assignments made by your engagement rules.
To learn more about this solution, please visit the Assigning Messenger Conversations Automatically as They Come In article.
Assigning Conversations Automatically Based on Their Source Channel
Let us say you manage support at a relatively small company and you have tasked one of your agents with handling the support requests that come in via Twitter. You can use a trigger to take any new conversation that comes in via Twitter and assign it directly to your social support staffer.
To learn more about this solution, please visit the Assigning Conversations Automatically Based on Their Source Channel article.
Assigning Conversations According to Their Form
Forms let you tailor the information you collect to suit the type of support request being submitted. You can use automations to build on that, by automatically routing new conversations that come in via a particular form to the team that is best equipped to handle it.
To learn more about this solution, please visit the Assigning Conversations According to Their Form article.
Assigning and Prioritizing Conversations Based on Subject Lines
Say a customer writes in and the espresso machine they bought from you has broken down, just before a big coffee-tasting event that they have scheduled. Their email subject line might read something like 'URGENT: An espresso machine is broken!'. Now, your support team might notice the subject line and jump on the conversation immediately — but we do not want to leave that to chance. We can build a trigger that will look for Urgent in the email subject line and immediately assign the conversation to the team leader, so they can make sure it is taken care of. We will also bump the conversation priority up to Urgent for good measure.
To learn more about this solution, please visit the Assigning and Prioritizing Conversations Based on Subject Lines article.
Sending conversations with a bad satisfaction rating to a review team
No one likes to see bad ratings, but when they come in, it is useful to understand what happened. You can use automation to take any conversation that receives a Bad satisfaction rating and send it to a Conversation Review team for analysis.
To learn more about this solution, please visit the Sending Conversations With a Bad Satisfaction Rating to a Specific Team or Agent article.
Preventing non-administrative users from changing assignments
For more control over who makes your assignments, you can build automation that will limit which users can assign conversations. Using certain criteria, you can prevent any user without administrator access from changing a conversation's assignee, unless they are currently assigned to it.
To learn more about this solution, please visit the Preventing Non-Administrative Users From Changing Assignments article.
Confirmation
Building these automations will make sure that conversations are routed to a particular agent or team based on the criteria you have specified in the trigger or monitor rules.
When a certain conversation meets the criteria set within the monitor or trigger, the automation will instantly change the owner or assignee of the conversation to whoever it is intended to.