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Overview
1. What is Advanced Work Assignment?
The Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) module works to offer work items (e.g. interactions such as chats and walk-ups, as well as tasks such as cases and incidents) to your agents. Work is routed to agents based on their group, availability, capacity, and skills.
After determining which agent is best suited to handle the work, it then offers the work to the agent via the Agent Inbox within a workspace. The agent will be notified using audio and visual alerts that new work arrived for them.
You have the option to allow agents to accept/reject or automatically assign the work to the agents. Once assigned, a view of the work will open to either view the records (for tasks) or interact with the requestor through the Agent Chat interface (for interactions).
For more details on AWA, click here.
2. What are the benefits of using AWA?
With AWA, work is routed to the agent that is best suited in that moment to receive the work. It reviews the availability, capacity, and skillset of those in the assigned group to determine to whom the work should be offered to. This leads to faster resolution times, as work is able to be assigned to only those who have the bandwidth and skills to complete it.
In addition, AWA enables agents to no longer need to manually sift through various lists of unassigned work items looking for work (a.k.a. the traditional “pull” model). Instead, work items are conveniently “pushed” to the agent’s inbox, so the agent can focus on doing the work, rather than looking for work.
3. How is routing performed within AWA?
Work items are automatically routed to queues that focus on certain types of support, using criteria such as product line, geographic region, work item priority, or customer status, just to name a few. The queues are entirely customizable to your organization’s needs, with criteria set that informs the system what work belongs in each queue.
For a more in-depth review of the routing process, please review the guide here.
4. How does AWA differ from traditional assignment rules (sysrule_assignment)?
AWA dynamically determines the agent best suited for assignment based upon the agent’s availability, capacity, and, optionally, skillset. Traditional assignment rules seek to use a defined, concrete set of criteria to assign work to certain agents/assignment groups irrespective of their current workload.
As a result of using AWA, agents are able to accept work only when they have bandwidth, leading to faster resolution times.
5. How do queues work in AWA?
Queues store the incoming work items that are yet to be assigned to a specific agent. AWA allows for multiple queues to be created - each queue should represent a type of work to facilitate alignment with agents (in assignment groups) responsible for handling that type of work.
To learn more about queues, click here.
6. Which service channels are supported in AWA?
A large range of service channels are available out-of-the-box including the following:
- Case
- Incident
- Chat
- SMS
- Facebook Messenger
- Line
- Walk-up
To see the complete list, click here.
You can also create a custom service channel for those not listed above. These channels must be child tables of either the Task or Interaction tables. To learn more about custom service channels, click here.
7. If I implement AWA, does it mean that all work items from that Service Channel will be routed?
No, you can have a combination of automated routing through AWA and manual routing via Assignment Rules (sysrule_assignment). To differentiate, ensure that criteria for the Service Channel and traditional assignment rules are mutually exclusive.
8. Is a workspace required in order to use Advanced Work Assignment?
Yes, AWA must be used in conjunction with a workspace with the Agent Inbox included. The agents will use the workspace to view their incoming work via their inbox and to set their presence. If you are using a Configurable Workspace, you can add the Agent Inbox to that workspace.
More information on workspaces can be found here.
9. How does AWA differ from Predictive Intelligence?
AWA routes work to queues and agents based on conditions defined by admins. Predictive intelligence however uses Machine Learning to predict the category and assignment group based on historical data. If you wish to include this level of intelligence into AWA, Agent Affinity may be used.
To learn more about Predictive Intelligence, click here.
10. Is there an analytics view tracking performance of AWA?
Yes – there are multiple dashboards available. Please reference the guide here.
Implementation
1. Is there an implementation guide?
Yes - please see below.
In addition, the following guide is also available: Setting up Advanced Work Assignment (AWA).
2. Does AWA require Virtual Agent to be enabled?
No, AWA does not have a dependency on Virtual Agent.
3. Does AWA require Agent Chat to be enabled?
No, AWA does not require Agent Chat to be enabled, however, Agent Chat has a dependency on AWA. This means that if you install Agent Chat, AWA will be included.
4. How do I route chats to an appropriate queue according to their context? E.g., IT related chats go to an IT queue, and HR chats to an HR queue
Routing of chats can be done through the use of context variables. The context variable can be set via a pre-chat survey, or in a Virtual Agent topic. Once set, you will need to configure the queues to use this context variable to determine which queue to enter as described here. A guide to implementing this feature is available here.
5. Does AWA have separate plugins for each area of the business?
The generic AWA plugin works across all areas, however, ITSM, CSM, and HR have their own AWA content plugins to provide a default configuration.
These default configurations consist of pre-made records (Service Channels, Queues, Inbox Layouts, Assignment eligibility etc) that cover the end-to-end implementation of AWA for the related records. It is recommended these are configured to your organizations specific needs.
6. How do I route tickets based upon a specific reason such as language preference?
When configuring your queues, implement routing rules in the Conditions field that review the user that created the work item’s language preference. One can also leverage skill based routing to implement this functionality as seen in the guide here.
7. How can I assign work based on the agent’s work history?
You can use the Agent Affinity feature to assign work items by an agent's work history, related task, or account team affinity. You can use Agent Affinity to customize the AWA assignment process and identify the agent best suited for the work item. To activate Agent Affinity, click here.
8. How do I migrate from Connect Support to AWA & Agent Chat?
Connect Support is in the process of being deprecated, which means it will no longer be supported from the Utah release onwards. Learn more about this and how to migrate here.
9. How can I update how the work is displayed in the inbox?
The inbox layout can be configured as defined here.
Usage
1. If a particular queue’s agents are busy and not able to accept additional work items, how do I re-assign it to another queue?
This is possible through the use of overflow configuration, in which you define a time limit for the primary queue agents' group, if any agent in that group does not respond within the time limit, the interaction will be re-assigned to another available agent group to work on.
To configure automatic distribution of overflow work items to an expanded pool of agents, follow the steps here.
2. What happens if an agent changes their status to unavailable, but they have work items in their inbox?
If the agent goes offline without first clearing their inbox, then that item will remain in their inbox. To avoid this issue, either:
- Set the timeout period in the assignment rule (awa_assignment_rule) to reassign the work item to a different agent once breached.
- Set the Max Wait Time in the queue to cancel the work item if the time limit is breached.
3. What happens if no agent in the group is available?
The work item will remain in the queued state until an agent becomes available. It is recommended that multiple assignment eligibility (awa_eligibility_pool) records are created for queues in which this might be an issue. The preferred assignment group should have the field “Eligible at” set to 0, whereas overflow assignment groups should have this value set to the time in which it should be routed to them.
4. How can I configure items to be re-offered to agents, even if they reject them initially?
Within your reject reasons (awa_reject_reason), set the field “Reassignable” to be true.
5. Can I automatically set the presence of agents to unavailable?
Yes – you can set the timeout for agent presence using the system property com.glide.awa.agent_inactivity_threshold_seconds. You may have to create it within your instance, with the value set to the number of seconds before the agent is marked as inactive.
6. Can I automatically assign work to agents?
Yes - beginning in the Tokyo release, you can have work automatically assigned to agents.
Learn how to configure this functionality here.
7. How can I assign incoming work to all members of a group?
Within AWA there is no method of routing/broadcasting work to an entire group at once. It is only offered to a single agent at any time. If this a requirement, then you can have the agents (or their manager) reviewing the incoming work item queue and assigning work to themselves manually, bypassing the agent selection procedure performed by AWA.
For more information
Where can I learn more about AWA?
- Visit the product documentation site here
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