Manage Ticket Assignment
So far, we have seen how to create a ticket and establish its priority based on impact and urgency. However, the status of this ticket is New, meaning nobody specific is working on it!
At the moment, you are the only support person handling customer tickets in your Zendesk instance, but, good news: Ashley Kranston has joined as a web developer and they can handle your ticket! First, we’ll need to add them and one other person to Zendesk. Let's see how in the video below:
The first thing we did, was to add a couple more team members:
Click the Admin icon.
Select People from the Manage menu section.
Select Add user.
Add Ashley, defining them as a Staff Member with the role of Agent. Give Ashley a valid email address that you can access and reply to as if you were the person.
You are a whizz at creating team members, so let’s add Umesh Misra as a Staff member - Administrator. Remember the “+” trick to give them an email address or set them up with a separate test account if that’s how you’re doing it.
Now that some of the support team is in place, let’s assign this ticket to Ashley:
Open the ticket again if needed.
Assign the ticket to Ashley.
Click Submit as Open and your ticket is now open for business (resolving), and Ashley is looking after it.
Look what’s happened, though; the ticket has disappeared from the “Your unsolved tickets” view. That’s expected because it’s now with Ashley.
Check the Views list on the left and select Unsolved tickets in your groups; we’re working as a team now, but it’s not easy to see who is looking after what ticket. Let’s add the Assignee field to our view:
Select the Admin menu.
Select Views from the Manage section.
Select the view we’ve just been using.
Scroll down the page and add the Assignee field.
Click Save.
Return to the view and notice that the Assignee field has been added at the end.
Great job! Someone with the right skills is now working on our ticket!
Escalate Your Ticket
We learned that priorities amount to how quickly tickets should receive a response and how quickly they should be resolved.
If a ticket is not making progress, it might need to be flagged to someone who can assign additional resources (i.e., more people, a higher-skilled person/team). According to the necessary specializations, you could say that the ticket moves up a tier, starting at L1, then moving to L2, L3, or L4. This action is called escalation.
Zendesk has a rules-based escalation system that can route tickets to other groups. These rules can be time-based or based on defined Service Level Agreements (some customers may pay more for a premium service) and keywords in ticket correspondence that might indicate the customer is getting frustrated! Escalations can also be triggered by poor customer satisfaction feedback. Setting up the automated rules is not something we’ll be doing on this course because it’s quite complex; however, check out this document if you want to read more.
Is there a simpler way to escalate tickets in Zendesk then?
It’s also possible to manually escalate a ticket. For example, there is a field called Request date that you can add to a view (try it!). You can use this date to determine the age of a ticket, and escalate any that exceeds a predetermined age for more prompt attention or at least some relevant “we have not forgotten about you” communication with the customer.
If you want to try a manual escalation, select Riley’s ticket and assign it to Umesh, who’s our team administrator/supervisor, and submit the change:
If your Zendesk emails are working, “Umesh” will receive notification that the ticket is now assigned to them.
As well as escalating the ticket, some organizations require a support team member to manually write up an escalation or intervention report, which gets walked to a team leader or manager for their urgent attention. It is an effective, witnessed way to confirm that an escalation has been brought to the attention of a senior stakeholder.
The intervention report needs to contain all necessary information regarding the escalated issue. Templates are normally used and list fields such as:
The person or service concerned and their contact details.
A description of the intervention where you will mention:
Your name and position as the person escalating the ticket.
Any software or equipment concerned.
A transcript of the customer request.
A detailed description listing actions already taken.
The ticket status, and more precisely who is monitoring it and to whom it has been forwarded (escalated).
Let’s Recap!
Tickets are assigned to people or functional groups (e.g., web, networks, Linux, Windows, etc.) according to who is considered best to start working on the ticket.
Assignees may change as further discovery about the incidents is made.
Tickets at risk of exceeding the agreed response or resolve time may be escalated.
Zendesk has a rules-based escalation system that can route tickets to other groups.
When escalating a ticket, you might have to fill in an intervention report.
Now you know how to make tickets move forward and make sure you get the right people working on them! However, support requests are not always straightforward and easy to understand. In the next chapter, we’ll see how to interact with customers and colleagues to resolve tickets in the best way.
