Demonstrated success, not a skills matrix
Every organisation has a skills list and most are out of date, self-declared, or both. Matching on who has actually resolved similar fault codes uses evidence you already generate.
Resolution Agent
Automatic agent assignment
Tickets matched to the agent most likely to resolve them — on skill, on past success with similar fault codes, and on current workload — rather than round robin or whoever happens to be free at the time.
- Matched on skill and demonstrated success
- Current workload weighed into the decision
- Fewer reassignments and fewer cold starts
- The field service version also weighs parts and location
Round robin is fair to agents and expensive for everyone else
Most assignment is round robin or first-available. Both are easy to explain and neither has any relationship to who will actually resolve the ticket.
The reassignment is the visible cost and the smaller one. The larger cost is the tickets never reassigned, worked slowly by somebody capable but unfamiliar while a person two desks away had closed the same fault three times.
What goes into the decision
Most routing rules stop after the second step. The third is where the difference is.
- Step 1
What the ticket actually is
Assignment starts from a categorised, understood request rather than a subject line.
- Step 2
Who has skill in it
Skills and product coverage narrow the field to who could handle it at all, which is where most routing rules stop.
- Step 3
Who has actually resolved it
Past success with similar fault codes is what makes this more than a skills matrix.
- Step 4
Who has capacity now
Current workload is weighed in, so the best-matched person is not handed everything until they become the bottleneck.
Three reasons this holds up in practice
Skills-based routing has a well-known failure mode, and the second point is the fix.
Capacity is part of the match
Matching on suitability alone concentrates every hard ticket on the same three people until they are the queue. Weighing workload is what makes it sustainable.
It removes a coordination job
When assignment is automatic, nobody spends their morning distributing work and the routing does not degrade the week that person is on leave.
Why the usual approaches fall short
Two optimise the wrong thing and two do not scale.
Round robin
Perfectly fair and entirely unrelated to who will resolve it.
First available
Optimises speed of pickup rather than speed of resolution, which are frequently opposite.
Manual assignment by a lead
Accurate while that person is there, and it consumes a senior person every morning.
Routing by product only
Says nothing about who inside the team has solved this before.
What things are called
Assignment and dispatch solve the same problem under different constraints.
- Assignment
- Matching a request to the person who will work it.
- Skill match
- Narrowing to the people who could handle the request at all.
- Demonstrated success
- Past resolution outcomes on similar fault codes, used as evidence in place of a declared skill.
- Load balancing
- Weighing current workload so that the best match does not become the bottleneck.
- Dispatch
- The field service version, which also accounts for parts availability and technician location.
Frequently Asked Questions
This is the support-desk version: ticket to agent. Dispatch is the field service version, where the same idea also has to account for parts availability and where the technician physically is. Related, and genuinely not the same decision.
Resolution Agent
Look at your reassignment rate
Reassignments are the cheapest measure of bad routing, and you already collect them. Show us yours and we will show you how much of it was avoidable.
Talk to us