Assignment, teams and automatic routing

A ticket in Auralis can be assigned to a person, to a team, or to both. The two are independent fields, and understanding that they are independent removes most of the confusion around routing.

Assigning to a team means "this belongs to Billing" without yet saying who in Billing will handle it. Assigning to a person means "this is Priya's". A ticket can sit on a team with no individual owner, which is the normal state of an unclaimed queue, and it can be assigned to a person with no team, which is what happens when somebody simply picks up a ticket that arrived without routing.

Teams

A team is a named group with a description and a colour, and a set of members drawn from your workspace. Team names are unique within a workspace. Editors can create and edit teams; deleting a team requires an admin, and before you delete one you can ask for a deletion impact summary so you can see what currently points at it. When a team is deleted, tickets that were on it have their team field cleared rather than being deleted themselves.

Automatic assignment

Each team has an assignment strategy, which decides what happens when a ticket lands on the team without an individual assignee. There are three:

• Manual — nothing happens automatically. The ticket sits on the team until somebody takes it. This is the default and it is the right choice for a small team that works out of a shared queue.
• Round robin — tickets are handed out to eligible members in turn, using a cursor stored on the team so that the rotation continues across tickets rather than restarting.
• Load — the ticket goes to the eligible member who currently has the fewest tickets in an unfinished state, counting open, pending and on-hold tickets. Ties are broken consistently, so the behaviour is deterministic rather than random.

Who counts as eligible matters as much as the strategy. To receive an automatic assignment, a person must be an active member of the workspace, must be a member of that team, and must not be offline. They must also not have marked themselves unavailable — agents can set an availability flag on their own profile, and doing so takes them out of the rotation without removing them from the team. This is what you want somebody to use when they go to lunch or into a long meeting, rather than being removed from the team and added back.

If nobody is eligible — everyone is offline, everyone is unavailable, or the team has no members — the ticket simply stays on the team with no individual assignee. Automatic assignment never fails loudly and never invents an assignee; it either finds somebody or leaves the ticket where a human will see it.

Automatic assignment runs in three situations: when a ticket is created with a team but no assignee, when a macro routes a ticket to a team, and when a ticket is explicitly pushed to a team through the assign action.

Every automatic assignment writes an entry on the ticket's timeline recorded as a system action rather than as something a person did, and notes which team it came through. The person who receives the ticket is notified.

Unassigning

Clearing an assignment is an explicit action rather than a matter of emptying a field. In the interface this is the "unassign" control; when you are working through the API, it is a dedicated flag rather than sending a null assignee, because a missing value means "leave this alone" rather than "clear this". There are separate controls for unassigning the person, unassigning the team, and unlinking the customer.

Clearing an assignment records it on the timeline, showing who the ticket moved away from. If the field was already empty, nothing at all is recorded — Auralis does not write history for a change that did not change anything, which is also why re-saving a ticket without editing it does not disturb its last-updated time or push it back up the inbox.

A practical routing setup

The arrangement that works for most teams is: route inbound work to a team on arrival, either by hand at triage or through a macro, and let the team's strategy decide the individual. Keep the strategy on manual while the team is small enough that everyone can see the whole queue, and switch to load when the queue gets big enough that people start double-picking the same ticket. Use round robin rather than load when fairness across the team matters more than levelling out current workload — for example when tickets are of roughly equal size and you want an even distribution over the week.