Assignment engine

Rules decide the owner before anyone opens the ticket

Routing rules run top to bottom the moment a ticket lands. They read the sender, the client, the subject line and the tags, then set the owner, the priority and the queue. Nothing waits in Unassigned for someone to volunteer.

  • Ordered rule list: first match wins, drag to reprioritise
  • Round-robin and load-aware assignment across on-duty agents
  • Keyword, client, mailbox and tag conditions in one builder
  • Dry-run tester: paste a real ticket and see which rule fires

Round-robin, load aware

Ticket HD-4182 - tag billing, priority high
Amy
Jon
Leah
Theo

Inside the workspace

What your team actually sees

Workspace Home shows unassigned volume, who is carrying what and where the queue is drifting - the numbers your routing rules are meant to keep flat.

HookdeskBeta
AC

Good morning, Adam

Last 7 days

9

Assigned to me

3

Due within 4h

1

SLA at risk

0

Unassigned

184

Resolved (7d)

4.7

CSAT (7d)

My queue - due first

  • Invoice total looks wrong12m left
  • Cannot sign in to the portalbreached
  • Order SO-88213 never arrived1h 40m
  • How do I add a teammate?3h 05m

Setup health

  • Mailboxes connected3 syncing
  • Routing rules active11
  • Pending invites2
  • Portallive at help.northwind.co

Capabilities

Built for this job, not bolted on

Round-robin

Distribute evenly across the agents who are actually on duty today, skipping anyone away or at capacity.

Load aware

Weight assignment by open ticket count so a slow, complex ticket does not get buried under five more.

Condition builder

Match on sender domain, client, mailbox, subject keywords, tags or priority, and combine conditions per rule.

Actions per rule

Assign, set priority, add tags, move to a queue, or leave for manual triage - each rule can do several at once.

Dry-run tester

Test a rule set against a sample ticket before you turn it on, and see exactly which rule claimed it and why.

Team-aware

Rules respect roles and team membership, so escalations only land on people allowed to handle them.

How it runs

From arrival to answer

  1. 1

    Evaluate

    The rule list runs in order against the new ticket's attributes.

  2. 2

    Match

    The first rule whose conditions all pass claims the ticket.

  3. 3

    Apply

    Owner, priority and tags are set, and the SLA policy for that priority starts.

  4. 4

    Record

    The audit trail notes which rule fired, so surprises are debuggable.

End to end

Everything this part of the platform covers

Each block below is a working part of the product, not a roadmap item.

Rule builder

Ordered rules with conditions and actions, evaluated top down on arrival and on update.

  • Conditions on sender, client, mailbox, subject, body, tag and custom field
  • Actions to assign, set priority, add tags, move status and notify
  • Drag to reorder, with the first matching rule winning by default
  • A dry-run tester that shows exactly which rule would fire on a sample ticket

Assignment models

Ownership is explicit, so nothing sits in a shared pile hoping someone will pick it up.

  • Round-robin across a group, respecting availability
  • Direct assignment for named account owners
  • Group queues for teams like billing, delivery and technical
  • Reassignment recorded in the audit trail with the actor and reason

Triage automation

The routine classification work happens before an agent opens the ticket.

  • Automatic tagging from keyword and client rules
  • Priority escalation for named tiers and breached clocks
  • Auto-responses to acknowledge receipt within business hours
  • Rules can hand a ticket back to Unassigned when a condition changes

Safety rails

Automation is only useful if you can see and undo what it did.

  • Every rule action written to the ticket audit trail
  • Rules can be disabled without deleting their configuration
  • Loop protection so rules cannot ping-pong a ticket
  • Admin-only editing, enforced server side, not just hidden in the UI

Who it is for

What each person gets out of it

Team leads

Encode your triage playbook once instead of repeating it in stand-up.

Agents

Tickets arrive already tagged, prioritised and owned.

Admins

Dry-run every change before it touches a live queue.

Account owners

Named clients route straight to the person who knows them.

Features inside this area

Go a level deeper

Detail

The small print that matters

Fallback behaviour

If no rule matches, the ticket stays in Unassigned with a default SLA - it is never silently dropped.

Reassignment

Manual reassignment always beats a rule, and the change is logged with who did it.

Out of hours

Rules can route differently outside business hours, for example to an on-call rota rather than a queue.

Bulk re-run

Change a rule and re-run it across the open queue, rather than fixing tickets by hand.