In a former ticketing system that we used years ago, we had an open text field for assignment notes, and it was required to be filled out anytime the ticket was reassigned from the team it was originally assigned to. I liked this feature because it could provide more context behind the assignment, such as what troubleshooting steps were taken prior to escalating, etc.

My opinion when it comes to iiQ, if you don’t have any crazy permissions set up like we do, either one would be acceptable as long as the receiving agent/team had access to the comment on the timeline.

Thanks @jclark 

My current thought is to put the comment in first and then assign the ticket. That way if the user has email notifications turned on, they would see the comment in the email when the ticket is assigned. If I do it in reverse, the default settings would cause two emails to be sent, 1 for the assignment and one for the comment.

That is a good point. I’m used to our agents ignoring emails so I never think about them lol.

I think an “Assign With Notes” feature would be a good option here. Honestly, a good use case for shortcuts too, if we could ever get some way to manage who shortcuts are shared with instead of just being district-wide.

Amen to shortcuts!

@jclark That is a great suggestion. Shortcuts will definitely be helpful in this situation. 

Another possible point to lean towards Option A, as we’ve encouraged our team to rely on Ticket Status (Submitted vs In Progress) as a way to identify the progress timeline of the ticket. Adding a Comment prior to assignment keeps the ticket status on Submitted and doesn’t trigger our SLA.

So for us - assigning to an Agent or Team activates the SLA, which in turn encourages some type of comment or action response on the ticket.

Thank you @bnagel for sharing your workflow! 

It would definitely be beneficial to have a trigger from when a change in an agent occurs or the ability to make a rule to require a reason/justification to occur. 

** I have initial ticket creations setup in rules by agent location and/or agent specialty areas but having the automatic requirement that a field has to be filled out like when an action wasn’t added to a ticket and you try to close it. would love to see if a feature like that could be added.

The way our district handles ticket flow and assigning tickets is as followed; 

When Teacher/Staff/Student/Parent puts in a ticket, I have setup a rule to have all tickets to be assigned to myself (Help Desk Admin) Then I go in and make sure the Issue is correct in the ticket (that the user didn’t select the wrong category) If the ticket is missing information I will ask all the clarifying question and document all information needed. I also edit the subject line to help out the Agent so that they know what/who/where needs assistance. For example subject will read as follow (Asset Tag Number of Device/School Name/Person Name/Room Number/Brief Describe of the issue) that way tickets don’t become confusing for the agents. If the issue can be fixed with me then I will complete the ticket. If not then the ticket will be assigned to an agent that specialize in that issue. Agents also can’t assign tickets to other agents or Admins. We had problems with agents going back and forth with a ticket so it was decided that only Admins will be allowed to assign tickets. 

Thank you @TimH and @nikiscott83 for adding your thoughts to this thread! 

@davecarty 

It seems like both of your options are manual. We try to stay away from manual ticket assignments just based on scale and the creation of service bottlenecks. Typically, tickets get assigned to tier 1 techs based on locations (i.e. schools), as techs are assigned to locations. However, some specific issue types will get directly assigned to a tier 2 team (support supervisor) or tier 3 team (system admins). If a tier 1 tech needs support, they will escalate the ticket to a higher tier.

Thank you @bbeaudette for adding your automatic workflow here!