How do I route incidents to my staff members based on the queue(s) they have access to?
Environment:
Accounts, Profiles / Incident Routing / Business Rules
Oracle B2C Service
Resolution:
You can configure rules to assign incidents to queues. The staff member's profile specifies which queues the staff member can pull incidents from along with the pull policy, pull quantity, and inbox limit. That is, based on the staff profile, a staff member can pull incidents from the queues listed on the Service tab in their staff profile. Using the Fill Inbox feature, only incidents that are not assigned to a specific staff member and have an unresolved status type can be pulled from a queue.
When editing an incident, it is not possible to make the Queue field a required field.
Round-Robin Assignment: You can configure the queue so that when incidents are assigned to the queue, the incidents are distributed using round-robin assignment to the staff members who can pull from the queue. That is, incidents can be pushed, using round-robin, to staff members. NOTE: Round Robin assignments work with all status types except "waiting" and "resolved", where the assigned value is null.
Incidents are assigned via round robin to all staff whose profile can pull incidents from that queue. For example, if you have three staff profiles that include the queue, incidents will be routed to all staff who use any of those three profiles.
When round-robin assignment is enabled, incidents are assigned to the staff members. Incidents are not assigned to staff accounts that are disabled or locked in the Staff Accounts table.
The round-robin assignment does not load balance the number of incidents assigned to each staff member. It does not assign more incidents to staff members who have fewer incidents assigned to them when there is capacity for the agents. For example, if the total limit is 20 incidents per agent and an agent has 10 incidents, another agent has 15, and the last agent has 19 unresolved incidents, the remaining unassigned 5 incidents will get distributed evenly until the total limit is reached. In this example, the first agent will get 2 incidents for total of 12, the second agent will get 2 for total of 17, and the last agent will get 1 more incident for total of 20.
Default Queue: You can define one of your queues to be the default queue for incidents created from the administrative pages. That way, incidents created by your staff members can be automatically assigned to that default queue unless otherwise routed by a rule. To set the default queue, open the queue for editing and check the Default check box.
Therefore, if you want incidents routed via round robin to a specific work group, create a rule to assign the incidents to a specific queue. Then, if the staff members all use the same profile, make sure that profile is the only one that has the queue listed in the Queue box on the Service tab. If your staff members have several different profiles, make sure that all of the profiles have the queue listed on the Service tab and make sure that no other profiles include that queue.
Typically, to set up your Oracle B2C Service application so that staff can pull from a queue, you must:
- Set up the incident queue.
- Set up a rule to assign incoming incidents to a queue.
- Create a profile that allows access to the queue.
- Assign staff members to the profile.
If the incident gets assigned to a group which uses a different queue, the queue must be unset so the round robin push methodology does not reassign the incident to the next available agent of the prior group. For example, you have “2nd Level” group and a “1st level group”. The assigned field of the incident is moved from “1st level” to “2nd level”. However the incident’s queue does not change. So, you’ll want to also change the queue to coincide with a queue used by 2nd Level. This can be done through workspace rules or business rules.
For more information and specific steps for each of the actions listed above, refer to Answer ID 1840: Creating and Using Incident Queues. See also, the 'How to Route Incidents to Queues' section in online documentation.
For more incident routing options, refer to the 'Rules for Routing Customer Support Questions' section in the Online Help User Guide documentation. To access Oracle B2C Service manuals and documentation online, refer to the Documentation for Oracle B2C Service Products.
