Configuring Technician Auto Assign

Apart from assigning technicians to requests using Business Rule, selection of category, or from the UI, technicians can be automatically assigned to requests on configuring the Technician Auto Assign option. The Technician Auto Assign follows the Round Robin or Load Balancing methods and based on the availability of the technicians, the requests are assigned. So if a technician is unavailable on a specific day, and the due by the time of certain requests falls on that day, the technician on leave will not be assigned to those requests.

To access Technician Auto Assign configuration, go to Setup >> Automation >> Technician Auto Assign.

Enable Technician Auto Assign

  1. Select Enable Technician Auto Assign checkbox.
  2. Choose whether you want the Technician Auto Assign to work only for the Incidents or Incident and Service Requests.
  3. Choose the model to auto assign the requests. Requests are assigned to the technicians either through:
    • Round Robin: In this model, technicians are assigned to the request irrespective of the load.
    • Load Balancing: The number of requests that are in progress and assigned to a technician is taken as the load of the technician. So on selecting this model, technicians with the least load are assigned to requests.
    • Artificial Intelligence: Zia, Zoho's Artificial intelligent agent, analyzes the request and assigns the most relevant technician to the request. To enable this model, you must set up technician prediction and train Zia first. Learn more.
  4. Select when to execute the technician auto assign option - for newly created requests, edited requests or both. Note that technician auto assign is not applied while editing requests that are already assigned to technicians.
  5. Choose which requests are applicable for technician auto assign:
    • Unassigned Requests: Technician auto assign is applied to all requests that are unassigned even after passing through all Business Rules and Category selections.
    • All Requests: Technicians assigned to requests through business rules or category selection will be overridden.

Consider Technician Availability

Enable the Auto-assign requests based on technician availability check box to automatically assign requests to only available technicians based on Created date or Due by date.

Created date: This option ensures that only the technicians who are available on the day of request creation are assigned.

Online Technicians: This option ensures that only online technicians are assigned requests.

Due date: This option ensures that only the technicians who are available on the request's Due by date are assigned.

Exclude Technicians from Auto Assign

You can exclude certain technicians from being auto-assigned say, the administrator, site admin, change manager.

  1. Click Exclude the following Technician check box.
  2. Click Add Technicians to exclude link. The list of technicians available in the application appears.
  3. Select the technicians to be excluded from the drop-down list. 
  4. You can delete individual technicians from the Selected Technicians list using the delete icon. Click Delete All link to delete all the technicians from the Selected Technician list.

Exclude Requests from Auto Assign

You can also exclude certain requests from being auto-assigned to technicians. Say, for example, requests with the priority as "High" should not be auto-assigned to technicians.

  1. Select Enable Exceptions check box.
  2. Configure the Criteria in the combo box.
  3. Choose to match all the exceptions (AND) or any of the exceptions (OR) from the drop-down.
  4. Click Save.