Using Agent Affinity
Summarize
Summary of Using Agent Affinity
Agent Affinity is an Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) feature in ServiceNow that enhances how work items are assigned to agents. It customizes the assignment process by considering an agent’s previous work history, related tasks, or account team roles, ensuring consistency by assigning similar work items to the same agent whenever possible. This feature complements AWA’s existing criteria like agent availability, capacity, and skills, but does not override any eligibility or constraint rules within AWA.
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Key Features
- Affinity Types:
- Historical Affinity: Assigns work to the agent who has previously served the same customer.
- Related Task Affinity: Assigns work to the agent who handled related past tasks.
- Account Team Affinity: Assigns work based on an agent’s role or responsibility within the customer’s account team (available to Customer Service Management customers only).
- Queue Association: Up to three affinity rules can be linked to each AWA queue, with a configurable priority order that the assignment engine follows to pick the best agent.
- Assignment Flow: The engine evaluates affinities in priority order and assigns the work item to the first available agent with capacity, falling back through the affinity types as needed.
Practical Example
When a customer, such as George Warren, initiates a new support request, AWA uses the configured affinity rules to assign the work item:
- First, it looks for an agent who handled related tasks (e.g., Ned, who previously addressed George’s case).
- If that agent is unavailable, it assigns to the primary account team agent (e.g., John, assigned to the Boxeo company).
- If still no agent is available, it assigns based on recent historical interactions (e.g., Beth, who recently handled a chat with Boxeo).
How to Use
- Create or Modify Agent Affinity Rules: Define rules that determine how work items are assigned within AWA queues.
- Set Affinity Order: Specify the priority order of affinity rules to guide the assignment engine.
- Deactivate Agent Affinity: Optionally disable Agent Affinity if you want AWA to assign work without affinity considerations.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
Implementing Agent Affinity enables more personalized and efficient work assignment by leveraging agent familiarity with customers and tasks. This improves customer experience by maintaining continuity in service and increases agent productivity by reducing context switching.
Agent Affinity is an Advanced Work Assignment feature that lets you assign work items by an agent's work history, related task, or account team affinity.
Advanced Work Assignment assigns work items to agents by their availability, capacity, and skills. You can use Agent Affinity to customize this AWA assignment process and identify the agent best suited for the work item. Agent Affinity ensures that the same agent is assigned to a similar work item instead of orienting a new agent every time.
- Historical
- Identifies the best agent based on the agent's history of serving the same customer.
- Related task
- Identifies the best agent based on the agent's past assignments of related tasks.
- Account team
- Identifies the best agent based on the agent's responsibility or role in the account team.
The following example shows how AWA uses Agent Affinity to determine the best agent for a work item. In this example, AWA is configured to use all three affinities in this order: related task affinity, account team affinity, and historical affinity. George Warren, who is a customer at the Boxeo company, has a router problem. George previously contacted support to report an issue. That case was assigned to agent Ned. The primary support agent for Boxeo is agent John. Within the past seven days, another agent, agent Beth, addressed a chat with Boxeo.
The next time George initiates a customer service chat from the case page, the case is automatically added as a related task to the chat interaction. Agent Affinity uses the related task affinity to look for an agent who has fulfilled past assignments for a related task. Because agent Ned was assigned to a related task on the record, AWA assigns the work item to agent Ned if available with capacity.
If agent Ned is unavailable or doesn't have the capacity, AWA uses the account team affinity. AWA looks for another agent based on an agent's responsibility or role in the account team. Because agent John is the primary support agent for the Boxeo company, AWA assigns the work item to Agent John if available with capacity.