Tag: Incidents

Customizable Menus: Incident queues

Using incident rules, you can route unresolved incidents into different queues based on the criteria you define. For example, you might add queues for different product lines or service areas. Or you might have a first tier for basic customer service and additional tiers for problems of increasing complexity.

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When you create profiles for staff accounts, you can assign one or more queues to each profile and specify how incidents are pulled from that queue. Based on their profile, agents can retrieve a specified number of incidents from the queues to which they have access.

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Queues also help you manage incident escalation to meet your organization’s SLAs, balance agent workload, and track agent productivity and efficiency.

The following steps provide an overview for managing queues:

  • Add queues
  • Assign queues to profiles
  • Create business rules to populate queues
  • Instruct agents about queues
  • Monitor queues

When you add an incident queue, you can define whether the queue uses a round-robin incident assignment and specify the queue as the default queue where unassigned incidents are routed. You can also delete queues from the Incident Queues editor. Before you can delete the incident queue, you must first edit the rules so they no longer use the queue.

Queue Type has the following options: Standard, Round Robin (All), or Round Robin (Logged In). A round-robin queue automatically assigns incidents in this queue to agents in a rotating fashion. If you select Round Robin (All), incidents are assigned to all staff members whose profile includes the queue, even if they are not logged in.

Customizable Menus: Incident statuses

An incident’s status is its state in the knowledge base. RightNow Service has 4 default incident statuses: Solved, Unresolved, Updated, and Waiting. Additionally, there are 3 default status types: Solved, Unresolved, and Waiting. You can rename the default statuses, but you cannot change their types.

Waiting status means that an agent has responded to the incident and is waiting for a response from the customer. If the customer does not respond within the time specified in CI_HOURS (Agedatabase Utility > Batch Processing > Close Incidents), Agedatabase sets the incident status to Solved.

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RightNow Service can automatically set an incident’s status when agents send a response. This is a property of the Incident Thread relationship item that can be set when you create an incident workspace. The property is called Status Change on Response, and you can set it for one of the following options:

  • The status does not change when an agent sends a response.
  • The status changes to Waiting.
  • The status changes to Solved.

When you add an incident status, you must assign it to one of the three default status types.

If you delete a custom incident status, all incidents set to that status are changed to the default status with the same status type. For example, if you delete a custom incident status with the status type Solved, all incidents that were associated with that status are changed to the Solved incident status with the Solved status type.