Getting Started with Advanced Work Assignment
Rethinking How Work Gets Done
By Jeff Hoffman and Prithvi Yoganand
Overview
Until now, routing and assignment in the ServiceNow platform was built primarily on a pull-based model. Assignment Rules, probably the most common means, use conditional criteria or scripting to assign a task to a particular Group or User. It’s pretty common to have this deployed into a shared model where users pull from a list of Cases (or other Task types) that is assigned to group.
This leads to a few challenges:
- Agents may not be in the best position to prioritize and determine what to work on next
- Depending upon the type of work, agents have to navigate to different parts of UI to accept new work
- Customer service managers need to have administrative bandwidth or the agents need to self-regulate themselves to fully utilize their available capacity
- Manual assignments require manager or team leads to make assignment decisions while keeping in mind each agent’s capacity, availability and skills. This takes precious time away from coaching agents and monitoring performance
- It is almost impossible for managers to manually assign real-time channels like chats to agents due to traffic volume and speed requirements
Advanced Work Assignment (also referred to as AWA) throttles work assignment using queues. It automatically routes work items to individual agents based on their availability, capacity and skills. Agents can set their availability status and channels for their Inbox and still have the ability to accept or reject work, as needed. If an agent receives the wrong piece of work or simply isn’t available at the time, they can reject the work item and send it back to the queue.
Agent and queue performance, work item metrics, and rejected reason codes, can be analyzed using the new Contact Center Manager Dashboard for AWA. This real time dashboard gives your managers the visibility into how AWA is performing and allow you to tune the assignment rules and other criteria to continue to improve over time.
What’s Available in Madrid
As we launch Advanced Work Assignment, our goal is to make assigning work an intuitive process to push work to your team. There are some new concepts and a few familiar terms that you’ll have to understand before getting up and running. In Madrid, we are offering predefined Service Channels that support the routing of Cases, Chats, Incidents and Walk Up.
The AWA experience requires Agent Workspace. This is a key consideration to remember. Any customer service agents using this functionality will need to have access to the roles required for workspace (workspace_agent) and AWA (awa_agent). Keep in mind, not all of your agents may require Agent Workspace and Advanced Work Assignment. These newer capabilities can easily launch alongside your UI16 (platform UI) without disrupting any user experiences that are not using Workspace as their primary UI.
Getting Started
Aside from activating the plugin, there are some clear cut steps to think through prior to launching for your agents.
Here are four key steps to walk through in your configuration process:
- What to route Configure the base service channels to be used.
- Where to route Define the work item queues and the routing rules, execution order, work item sort order (work prioritization), and overflow strategy
- How to assign work items Define the assignment rules that determine how the work items are pushed to agents
- What the agent sees Set the inbox card layouts and presence (availability) states that agents use in their Agent Workspace inbox.
Why It Matters
Introducing this feature is really exciting for our product team. AWA is a leap ahead in efficiency and customer satisfaction gains for powering more proactive service experiences and decreasing the time to resolve. This has been one of the most requested features for our Customer Service users that are looking to take their operations to the next level. Being able to support omni-channel routing with this push model that has the intelligence and flexibility that we’ve included is obviously powerful.
With AWA, our customers can start to differentiate with how they handle customer requests and issues. They can now easily support scenarios like VIP prioritization - which may have been a challenge until now. Overflow rules are easy to configure and manage so that your customers get the right service, at the right time. And to top it off, skills-based assignment is available and an area we will continue to enhance in future releases.
For more information, see the online documentation for details on getting started: Advanced Work Assignment
For a demonstration of AWA in action, please check out this recording from our Ask the Experts session:
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