Shifts sized before the queue builds
Demand is forecast by day and set against agents per shift, so understaffing shows up on the Leaderboard before it shows up as breached tickets.
Resolution Agent
Cognitive Routing
Route every ticket across regions and shifts on predicted demand, SLA, customer entitlement and agent capacity, so round-the-clock support decides who works a ticket the same way at 3 a.m. as it does at noon.
- Ticket demand forecast by day, with agents planned per shift
- SLA clocks set by entitlement and priority, not one global rule
- Region precedence per entitlement tier for follow-the-sun teams
- Assignment written straight onto the helpdesk ticket
Follow-the-sun support is a routing problem, not a staffing one
A global support team is several regional teams on different shifts, serving customers spread across every time zone. Each ticket has to land with someone who is on shift, has the skill, has room in their queue and can meet the response time that customer is entitled to.
Most routing answers only part of that question. Skill-based queues and workload balancing are common; deciding which region should take a Premier customer’s urgent ticket, or how many agents each shift needs next Tuesday, is usually left to a spreadsheet and a lead who knows the rules by heart.
What goes into the decision
Each input is reference data the team already owns. The tour shows every one of them being set up.
- Step 1
Predicted demand
Ticket volume is forecast ahead of time and compared against actuals, alongside predicted versus actual agent availability, so shifts are sized for the load that is coming.
- Step 2
Entitlement and SLA
Each customer maps to an entitlement tier. Each tier and priority carries its own coverage hours, first-response time and update cadence.
- Step 3
Regions and shifts
Precedence rules set which agent region takes a ticket first for each customer region and entitlement, with the next region in line when the first cannot.
- Step 4
Agent capacity
Every agent has a ceiling on concurrent tickets and on tickets per shift, so the best-placed person is not handed the whole queue.
Three things that change when routing is predictive
The first two are what traditional routing partly covers. The third is what it leaves to people.
Service that differs by entitlement on purpose
An Elite customer on the US Pacific coast can be routed to US agents first, then Europe, then India, while a Standard customer’s ticket starts in India. The order is a rule you can read, not habit.
Assignment lands where agents already work
The decision is written back to the ticket in the helpdesk. In the tour, two tickets from the same Elite customer, one low priority and one high, are assigned to different agents without anyone touching the queue.
Why the usual approaches fall short
Each one handles a piece of the decision and leaves the rest to judgement.
Skill-based queues
Find someone who can handle the ticket, with no view of whether they are on shift, already full, or in the region this customer’s contract expects.
Round robin or load balancing
Spreads work evenly, which is the wrong goal when an urgent Elite ticket and a low-priority question arrive together.
Static shift rosters
Planned from last quarter’s average, so a week with a two-hundred-ticket swing is either overstaffed or breaching.
A lead routing by hand
Knows the entitlement rules and the regions, works one shift, and takes the knowledge home at the end of it.
What things are called
The reference data the routing console is built on, in the order the tour shows it.
- Predicted demand
- Forecast ticket volume for each day, shown against actual volume once the day has passed.
- Entitlement
- The service tier a customer has bought for a product, such as Elite, Premier or Standard.
- SLA
- Coverage hours, first-response time and update cadence, set per entitlement and priority rather than once for everyone.
- Entitlement precedence
- For a customer region and entitlement, the ordered list of agent regions that should take the ticket.
- Agent capacity
- The most tickets an agent can hold at once, and the most they should take in a shift.
- Follow the sun
- Support handed between regional teams across time zones so customers are covered around the clock.
Frequently Asked Questions
Automatic Agent Assignment picks the best person for a ticket on skill, past success with similar fault codes and current workload. Cognitive Routing adds the global layer around that decision: predicted demand per shift, SLA by entitlement and priority, and which region should take a ticket first. Teams running one site mostly need the first; teams running follow-the-sun support need both.
Where this fits
Automatic agent assignment tour
The per-ticket match on skill, demonstrated success and workload that routing builds on.
Dispatch
The field service version: skills, parts availability and technician location weighed together.
Smart Backlog Agent
What happens to the queue as a whole once individual tickets are routed well.
More Resolution Agent tours
Cognitive Routing
Bring us your SLA matrix and shift roster
Send the entitlement tiers, regions and shifts you route across today. We will show you where predicted demand and your current rules disagree.
Talk to us