Until last year, every email to our service desk was read by an analyst who decided which team should handle it. It was slow at busy times, so we replaced it with automatic routing. About sixty rules, written in a workshop with each team, look for words in the subject and body and send the ticket to a queue. The rules are checked from the top and the first match wins.
The identity team, two people who deal with locked accounts and access, asked for their rules to sit near the top, because a locked out manager cannot wait. One of those rules sent anything containing the words password or login to them.
In the first month the desk looked transformed. The average time to assign a ticket fell from forty minutes to under one. Meanwhile the identity queue grew from about thirty open tickets to four hundred and ten.
People mention passwords in almost everything. The scanner app crashes after I enter my password. The printer is asking for a password. My login is fine but the report is empty. A supplier portal added a line to every notification email reminding users never to share their password, and every one of those forwarded to the desk went to identity too. When we sampled two hundred tickets in that queue, seventy one percent belonged to another team. The identity engineers spent their mornings reassigning tickets, and the real lockouts waited behind them. One depot manager could not sign in for a day and a half.
The analyst we replaced had been reading each message for what the person wanted. The rules read for which words appeared. And because the first match won, putting a team near the top to show its work was urgent had quietly given it first claim on half the inbox.
Routing now relies mainly on the category people choose in the desk portal, with three plain options for access problems, and on the subject line rather than the body. Signatures and footers are stripped before any rule looks at a message. Every reassignment out of a queue is counted, and any rule that sends more than fifteen percent of its tickets to the wrong place is reviewed that week.
A routing rule does not know what a ticket is about. It knows which words are in it, and people use the same words for very different problems.
– Serguey Shinder
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