Advanced Work Assignment - Incident Reopen

[Shreya Jain1]

Current behavior: When a customer reopens a ticket, it is assigned to the agent who handled it, regardless of whether that agent is available or not.
Desired behavior: When a customer reopens a ticket, it is assigned to the agent who handled it; however, if that agent is “offline,” the ticket should be placed in the work queue and subsequently assigned to another (available) agent via the normal AWA distribution process.

How can i achieve this with AWA? One solution is writing a BR and clearing out Assigned To field but is there a way to handle it within AWA??

[Tanushree Maiti]

Hi @Shreya Jain1 

Refer this post : Advanced Work Assignment to re-assign an item 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/agent-chat-routing-and-sidebar/transfer-of-assigned-tickets-whe...

[vaishali231]

Hey @Shreya Jain1 

AWA does not provide an out-of-the-box mechanism to automatically check whether the previous assignee is currently available when a ticket is reopened.

In most implementations, when a record is reopened and assigned back to the previous agent, AWA treats it as an already assigned work item and does not re-run its normal distribution logic based on agent availability.

A common approach is:

1. Detect when the ticket is reopened.
2. Check the availability/presence state of the previous assignee.
3. If the agent is available, retain the assignment.
4. If the agent is offline or unavailable, clear the Assigned To field and requeue the work item.
5. Allow AWA to pick up the work item and distribute it to the next eligible agent based on capacity, skills, and queue rules.

So, the Business Rule (or Flow Designer) approach you mentioned is typically the recommended solution. The key is not just clearing Assigned To, but ensuring the work item is reintroduced into the AWA queue so that standard routing can occur.

If you want to stay as close to AWA as possible, another option is to store the previous assignee in a custom field and implement custom queue-routing logic that prefers the previous agent when available, otherwise falls back to normal AWA distribution. However, this still requires customization and is not supported by a native AWA setting.

Therefore, for most use cases, a reopen-triggered Business Rule/Flow that validates agent availability and requeues the work item when the agent is offline is the simplest and most maintainable approach.

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Regards

Vaishali Singh

Servicenow Developer
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaishali-singh-2273361bb