Using Teams in Help Desk Automations

Using Teams in Help Desk Automations

You can include teams in help desk automations like Workflows, Assignment Rules (both direct and round robin), Time-based rules, etc. This way you can send notifications, auto-assign tickets, and send escalation emails to teams. Let us look into how each of this automation functions can be put to use with some examples.

Team as Filter Criterion
Automation rules use criteria to filter matching records to apply actions to. You can add teams to the criteria as you set up an automation function. This can be done by selecting "Team" in the Criteria field of the rule. You can add more filters by using AND or OR conditions in the criteria section.



Notification Rules/Triggers
Team notifications enable you to send teams an email whenever a pre-defined event occurs. For example, a new ticket or task gets assigned, customer response is received, a comment was left, etc. By default, all agents in a team will receive these notifications. Zoho Desk includes a set of prebuilt notifications for the most common team events. Read more about it here.

Please note that the prebuilt notifications cannot be edited. You may create a workflow rule if you wanted to create a custom notification rule.

Direct Assignment Rules
Route your incoming tickets to the team that is best equipped to help customers or offers specialized support. You can create an assignment rule that auto-assigns tickets to your team and then to agents within the team based on criteria you define. For example, let us consider you provide support for multiple products, and have dedicated teams for each product. By using filters that look for specific product names, you can auto-assign tickets to the respective teams regardless of what department it is received. Read more about it here.

Round-robin Assignment Rules
Assign tickets to agents in a team automatically in round-robin style. The round-robin assignment rule helps you distribute tickets to the members of a team equally. For example, a 24/7 support center might place the agents who work in EMEA hours into one team and those who work in APAC hours in another. The tickets can then be filtered based on their region (custom field) or support email address (domain) to assign tickets to the appropriate team. Read more about it here.

Workflows
Automate your everyday activities and support processes by creating workflows for teams. You can send out alerts, create: tasks, calls or events and updates fields. Here are some scenarios for which the workflows can be helpful:
  • Assign tickets to a team by their channel or based on specific keywords.
  • Route tickets from your paid or priority customers to a specialized team.
  • Send out an email notification to a team when their ticket has reached a preset number of interactions.
  • Add and assign a task to a team based on rule criteria.
  • Read more about it here.

Time-based Rules
Time-based rules are a combination of alerts, tasks, and field updates that are triggered when a timed event occurs. You could use teams as a criterion in the time-based rules. Since the rules are processed once every hour, you can put them to use to monitor aberrations as suggested below:
  • Notify Managers when tickets were assigned to a team but have not been picked by an agent after x hours.
  • Assign tickets to a different team x hours before they go overdue.
  • Notify Managers when agents reassign their tickets inside their team.
  • Read more about it here.

Define Service Levels for Teams
Define response and resolution times for teams so that you can track their performance and deliver agreed upon service to customers. You can add teams to SLA targets so that their tickets get assigned with pre-defined due periods. Also, if you have set up a tiered team structure (i.e., Level 1, Level 2 and so on), you could escalate tickets to different teams when they breach an SLA. Read more about it here.

Macros
Macros are a set of actions that can be applied to tickets manually. The actions can include sending emails, creating tasks, and updating a field in the tickets with a specified value. You can use teams as a criterion while creating a macro. For example, you could add a macro to escalate tickets to Level 2 team and set its priority to high in one click. Read more about it here.


Also Read:    Teams Overview    |    Add and Manage Teams    |    Assigning Tickets to Teams


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