Assigning tickets to teams is an important part of managing tasks and projects efficiently. When a new ticket comes in, deciding which team should handle it can streamline workflows and ensure issues are resolved quickly by the appropriate people.
Why assign tickets to teams?
There are a few key reasons to assign tickets directly to teams rather than individuals:
- Balances workloads – Teams can share responsibility for completing tickets, rather than individuals getting overwhelmed.
- Improves accountability – When a team is assigned a ticket, there is shared ownership to get it done.
- Prevents silos – Cross-functional teams bring multiple skillsets together to tackle tickets.
- Develops teamwork – Working together on tickets builds team cohesion and collaboration.
- Increases speed – Teams can parallelize work and accelerate ticket resolution.
- Enhances expertise – Team members develop deeper skills in the tickets they commonly work on.
- Simplifies tracking – You can view and filter tickets at the team level for easier reporting.
With so many benefits, assigning tickets to teams rather than just individuals is a best practice in most organizations. But how exactly do you go about assigning tickets to the right teams?
How to choose which team to assign a ticket to
When determining the best team to handle a new ticket, there are a few steps you can follow:
- Categorize the ticket – Review the ticket details and summarize it into a high-level category like “website bug”, “feature request”, or “hardware issue”. This makes it easier to match to a team.
- Identify candidate teams – Which teams in your organization work on categories related to the ticket? A website bug could go to the web development or QA teams for example.
- Consider team workload – Which of the candidate teams has availability to take on a new ticket in terms of their existing assignments and bandwidth?
- Confirm specialty – Does the ticket fall squarely within one team’s expertise? The most qualified team should handle highly technical tickets.
- Check cross-training needs – Will assigning the ticket to a certain team allow them to expand their skills through cross-training?
- Factor in urgency – For high priority tickets, choose a team that can start work immediately.
By quickly analyzing the ticket and your team capabilities using criteria like this, you can rapidly home in on the right team to take ownership.
Configuring ticket assignment rules
Manually evaluating and assigning each ticket takes time. You can streamline and scale the process by establishing pre-defined assignment rules. Configuring rules upfront will automatically route new tickets to the appropriate teams.
Here are some common ways to set up ticket assignment rules:
- By ticket category – Set rules to assign tickets based on their high-level category like “sales”, “webapp-bug”, etc.
- By project – Assign tickets to teams who own specific projects.
- By workflow step – Route tickets to teams based on the current step in a defined workflow process.
- By custom field – Use values in a custom field on tickets to define assignment logic.
- By team round-robin – Automatically cycle through teams by distributing each new ticket to the next available team.
Defining a clear set of assignment rules will save you time on manually assigning tickets while also making the process consistent. Tickets will always go to the right teams.
Handling exceptions and one-off assignments
Even with solid rules in place, there will be exception scenarios that require one-off ticket assignments. For example:
- Emergency ticket that requires immediate attention
- Complex ticket spanning multiple teams
- New type of ticket without an existing assignment rule
- Need to re-assign an in-progress ticket
When special cases come up, there are a few options for handling one-off assignments:
- Manually override – Assign the ticket to a specific team as a one-time override.
- Edit the rules – If new exception scenarios emerge, update the assignment rules accordingly.
- Use a generalist team – Have a flexible team handle special cases across categories.
- Create an exception queue – Tickets needing specialized handling can go into a shared queue for triaging.
- Add comments – Leave notes on why a ticket was specially assigned for future reference.
With an approach for dealing with exceptions, your team assignment processes can be both automated and flexible.
Tracking team performance and capacity
An important aspect of assigning tickets to teams is then being able to track team workload, throughput, and cycle times. Monitoring key performance metrics will ensure teams stay utilized but not overloaded.
Some metrics to track on team ticket handling include:
- Active tickets – Tickets currently assigned to each team
- Throughput – Number of tickets completed per week/month per team
- Cycle time – Average time to resolve tickets for each team
- Backlog – Tickets assigned but not started, by team
- Load balancing – Comparing workloads across teams
Visual reports and dashboards make it easy to analyze these team metrics in real-time. At a glance, you can spot imbalances, backlogs, or drops in throughput.
Armed with this data, you can tweak assignment rules to improve distribution and workflow. You may identify a need to shift certain ticket types between overloaded and underloaded teams. Or add headcount to teams that are lagging.
Ongoing metrics provide the visibility to optimize team assignments and keep your ticket resolution engine humming.
Tips for effectively assigning tickets to teams
Follow these best practices when implementing a team assignment model for tickets:
- Document your assignment rules for reference.
- Hold training on the ticket workflow process.
- Set up a system for periodic rule review and tuning.
- Give teams visibility into tickets assigned to them.
- Automate assignments using ticketing platform rules when possible.
- Review team metrics often and adjust balancing as needed.
- Have a swing team that can flex between categories as needed.
- Celebrate teams who achieve goals for cycle time or throughput.
With well-defined processes, transparency, and continuous improvement, distributing tickets across teams can significantly scale up productivity, expertise, and customer satisfaction. Adopting a team assignment model positions your support teams for growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should you assign tickets to teams instead of individuals?
Assigning tickets to teams has many benefits over individuals. Team assignment shares the workload, builds accountability, prevents silos, fosters teamwork, speeds up resolution times, develops specialized expertise, and simplifies tracking and reporting.
How do you decide which team should be assigned a new ticket?
Review the ticket details and categorize it. Identify which teams work on related tickets and have availability. Factor in specialty, workload balance, cross-training needs, and urgency. Run through criteria like this to select the best team match.
What are some ways you can set up assignment rules to automate routing tickets?
Rules can assign based on ticket category, project, workflow step, custom fields, and round-robin distribution. Configuring rules streamlines the assignments process and ensures consistency.
What do you do with exception tickets that don’t meet normal assignment criteria?
One-off assignments can be manually overridden on a case by case basis. Updating rules, using generalists, adding exception queues, and leaving comments can also help handle special cases. Be prepared to handle exceptions even with defined processes.
What metrics should you track at the team level for ticket assignments?
Track active and assigned tickets, throughput, cycle times, backlog, and workload balancing across teams. Consistently monitor these metrics and make changes to optimize distribution and throughput.
Conclusion
Assigning support tickets directly to teams improves efficiency, accountability, and customer satisfaction. By carefully selecting assignment criteria, setting rules to automate allocations, tracking team metrics, and being flexible to handle exceptions – organizations can streamline workflows and accelerate ticket resolution. Cross-functional teams working collaboratively on well-categorized tickets will exceed performance goals and provide a higher level of service.