Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) for HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace overview

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 5 minutes to read
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    Summary of Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) for HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace overview

    The Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) for HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace in ServiceNow automates the assignment of HR cases, chats, and interactions to agents based on their availability, capacity, and skills. This improves the efficiency of routing work items and ensures that qualified HR agents receive appropriate assignments in their inboxes.

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    AWA serves as an alternative to traditional HR templates, assignment rules, and matching rules by dynamically pushing work items to agents through configurable queues and routing criteria. Agents’ workload capacities can be set to limit active work items, and rejected items are rerouted automatically.

    Key Features

    • Plugin Activation: Activate the Advanced Work Assignment for HRSD plugin to enable AWA and its dependencies, including agent affinity and chat routing features.
    • Skill Management: Optionally activate Skills Management and Skill Determination plugins to map skills to HR cases and interactions via skill determination rules.
    • Service Channels and Queues: Utilize preconfigured service channels for Chat and HR Case, each with eight queues corresponding to Centers of Excellence (COEs) and HR tables. Queues link to assignment groups for agent routing.
    • Assignment Rules: Use provided assignment rules to route work by capacity alone or by both capacity and mandatory skills, ensuring work is assigned to the best-suited agents.
    • Agent Inbox and Layouts: Assigned work items appear automatically in agents’ inboxes with customizable inbox layouts for efficient task management.
    • Business Rules: Enable appropriate business rules depending on whether skill determination or HR templates are used for skill mapping. These rules populate skill tables that AWA references for routing decisions.
    • Workspace Agent Chat Integration: Real-time messaging routes chats through the AWA queues. When Virtual Agent is active, chat topics map to queues to ensure accurate routing.

    Practical Considerations for Implementation

    • Deactivate existing HR Assignment and Matching Rules to avoid conflicts with AWA.
    • Ensure HR templates do not specify assignment groups or skills since AWA manages these dynamically.
    • Configure the HR Fulfiller UI field to use Agent Workspace for chat functionality.
    • Use skill determination rules for advanced skill-based routing or rely on HR templates for simpler skill mapping.
    • When mandatory skills are enforced, work items will queue until an appropriately skilled agent becomes available, avoiding routing to unqualified agents.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    Implementing AWA in the HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace enables organizations to automate and optimize the matching of HR work items to the most suitable agents. This approach enhances agent productivity, improves service delivery times, and ensures employees receive timely and expert HR support. The system's configurability allows tailoring routing logic to organizational needs, including capacity constraints and skill requirements.

    Use the ServiceNow Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) for HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace to automatically assign a work item to agents based on their availability, capacity, and skills.

    Plugins

    Activate the Advanced Work Assignment for HRSD [com.sn_hr_awa] plugin if you have the HR admin role. Activating this plugin also activates:
    • Advanced Work Assignment [com.glide.awa]

      When activated, the Advanced Work Assignment for HRSD [com.sn_hr_awa] plugin supports the AWA routing with historical affinity for chat and cases when the Advanced Work Assignment - Agent Affinity [com.glide.awa.agent_affinity] plugin is activated.

    • Agent Chat [com.glide.interaction.awa]
    • Human Resources Scoped App: Core [com.sn_hr_core]
    You can also activate:
    • Skills Management [com.snc.skills_management]
      • Activated by default when the Human Resources Core [com.sn_hr_core] plugin is activated.
      • Only activate when you are using skill determination rules to map a skill to an HR case.
    • Skill Determination [com.snc.skill_determination]

      Activate when using skill determination rules. .

    • Interactions Management [com.glide.interaction]
    • Human Resources Scoped App: Virtual Agent Conversations [com.sn_hr_virtual_agent]

      Only activate when using Virtual Agent. For more information, see Virtual Agent for HR Service Delivery.

    Chat setup

    Ensure the HR Fulfiller UI field is set to Agent Workspace. For more information, see Configure Agent Chat for HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace.

    HR case

    AWA is an alternative to using:
    • HR templates (based on the HR service)
    • HR assignment rules
    • HR matching rules
    AWA automatically routes HR cases, chats, or interactions based on:
    • Availability
    • Capacity
    • Capacity and Skills

    AWA pushes cases to qualified HR agents using work item queues, routing conditions, and assignment criteria that you define. HR agents see their assignments in their inbox. You can set the capacity for an agent, which is the number of work items on a particular service channel that an agent may actively work on. You can set assignment rules to determine how AWA routes work items to a group of agents. If an agent rejects a work item, the item is rerouted to another agent.

    For more information, see Advanced Work Assignment.

    Note:
    To use AWA, you must ensure your:
    • HR templates do not identify assignment groups or skills.
    • Deactivate your existing HR Assignment Rules and HR Matching Rules.
    Agent Inbox:

    Using AWA you can automatically assign an HR case and have it appear in an agent's inbox.

    For more information, see Agent Inbox controls. The inbox layouts determine what appears on work item cards in an agent's inbox. For more information, see Inbox layout.

    Skill Determination Rules

    Use Skill Determination Rules as an alternative way to map skills to an HR case.

    The base system provides a skill determination rule for each COE and is inactive by default.

    There is also a skill determination rule for interactions:

    Skill determination rules for Interactions [Human Resources]. Defines what skills are required in chat and when creating an interaction. The script defines the mappings. By default, this skill determination rule is inactive.

    Service channels

    Service channels help assign specific types of chats or HR cases to the correct agents. For more information, see Service channels.

    There are two service channels provided with the base system:
    • Chat
    • HR Case
    Each service channel has eight (8) queues.
    • Each queue corresponds to a COE and HR table.
    • HR cases route to a corresponding queue.
    • Each queue defines an assignment group.
    • AWA logic reviews the assignment group and routes to the appropriate agent.

    AWA uses service channels to organize incoming requests from chats, cases, and incidents. AWA routes these work items to specific queues. For more information about AWA, see Agent Workspace Advanced Work Assignment (AWA).

    Business rules

    There are three (3) business rules. Activate only one:
    • Skill determination for HR Cases

      Use this business rule when you are using skill determination rules to map a skill to an HR case.

    • Copy skills to task_m2m_skill table

      Use this business rule when you are using HR templates to map a skill to an HR case.

      Note:
      These business rules make entries in the Task Skill [task_m2m_skill] table. AWA uses this table to determine final mapping between a task and a skill.
    • Skill determination for Interaction[HR]
      • Only activate this business rule when using chat assignment by skill.
      • Works with the Skill determination rules for interactions [Human Resources] to populate the Interaction Skill [interaction_m2m_skill] table.
      • AWA uses this table to check the mapping between interaction and skill.
      • Interaction records are automatically created when an employee initiates a chat.

    AWA Assignment Rules

    The base system provides two (2) AWA assignment rules. For more information, see Configure agent assignment rules.
    • Capacity based assignment for HR work items assignment rule

      Considers agents with the greatest availability for handling the work.

    • Capacity and skill-based assignment for HR work items assignment rule
      • Considers agents with the greatest availability and their assigned skills for handling the work. Assigned skills can optionally be made mandatory.
      • When skills are considered mandatory, only considers routing work items to agents that have the skills.
        Note:
        When agents with the correct skills are not available or their capacity is full, it does not route to other agents but will wait until one is available.

    Workspace Agent Chat

    Workspace Agent Chat is the real-time messaging system you use in HR Service Delivery Agent Workspace.

    Similar to HR case, there is a service channel for chat with eight (8) queues.

    Virtual Agent

    When Virtual Agent is active, the chat window shows Virtual Agent topics. Under the Chat service channel under AWA, there is a script that maps the additional Virtual Agent topics to the queue.

    When Virtual Agent is not active, the chat window shows the Employee Service Center (ESC) pre-chat categories. Under the Chat service channel under AWA, there is a script that maps the additional Virtual Agent topics to the queue.
    Note:
    You can distinguish the queues by the ESC pre-chat categories and Virtual Agent topics.
    For more information, see Virtual Agent.

    If you are migrating from Connect Support, use AWA to create the chat queues for routing chat work items to agents and the Chat Setup form to configure Agent Chat. For more information, see Migrate from Connect Support to Advanced Work Assignment and Agent Chat.

    For more information on Workspace Agent Chat, see Workspace Agent Chat.