Incident routing
When an issue is reported, an incident is created, which should be assigned to a person who upon assignment resolves the issue and closes it. Incident routing deals with the assignment of incidents to the correct group. Routing the incident to the appropriate group significantly reduces the total time required for resolving the issue. An inefficient process for routing of issues can result in delays that impacts the customers for an unknown period of time causing delays. An Intelligent Ticketing solution routes reported issues to the appropriate group that is skilled to resolve the ticket quickly.
Typically, a customer reports of an issue and the service desk agent creates an incident. Based on the discretion of the service desk agent and the information provided by the customer, the incident gets routed. However, for out-of-the-box events that are triggered by the Event monitoring application, incidents are routed using the CI characteristics and are assigned to the appropriate group. The automated incidents are different from the incidents created by the service desk agent because the automated incidents leverage the CI based characteristics.
Routing rules ensure that reported issues are routed to skilled resources that are best suited to resolve the ticket.
In the case of automated incidents, routing rules assign groups based on relevant CI characteristics. For example, the location of the CI is a relevant characteristic for routing the ticket to the appropriate location. Consider a customer from Italy who reports a possible memory issue with a server that is located in Canada. If the CI Location is not considered, a ticket would be created and assigned to a group based in Italy because the problem was reported by the customer from Italy. However, for faster resolution, it would be appropriate to assign the ticket to a supported group in the impacted location, which is Canada.
Routing option | To be used when ... |
|---|---|
Supported By group | A dedicated support group is responsible for a key CI such as a database server. |
Operational categorization | A support group represents a particular skill set. For example, a request for new VM should be routed to the group having expertise in VM provisioning. |
CI Location | The CI Location is to be considered for routing instead of Customer Location. |
Resolution categorization | A support group is aligned to a particular class of devices. For example, printing-related issues should be routed to IT department. |
Default support group | No routing options are specified or when the incident does not match the available assignment option. |
When tickets are created, the CI-based characteristics, such as the supported group, the resolution product categories, the product categories, the operational categories, and the location are considered for routing the tickets.
The following diagram illustrates the incident routing concept.
Routing order of precedence
The routing order of precedence is established based on the most relevant information available for the CI. For example, if an incident has information about the supported by group for Causal and Impact incidents, the incident is assigned to the appropriate Supported By group because this characteristic is the most relevant.
The CI-based routing uses the following order of precedence:
- For Causal incidents and Impact incidents, if Supported By group with Supported By role is defined, the ticket is assigned to the Supported By group.
- For Causal incidents, if Resolution Product Categories, Operational Categories, or Location is defined, the ticket is assigned to the support group that is associated with the defined category.
- For Impact incidents, if Product Categories, Operational Categories, or Location is defined, the ticket is assigned to the support group that is associated with the defined category.
For the tickets to be routed based on the rules, you must enable CI-based routing. For more information, see Enabling-CI-based-routing. If you do not enable CI-based routing, tickets are assigned to the default group, which is the default behavior.
Related topics
Incident rules (BMC Service Desk 8.1 space)