cherrypicking cases

blankzinga

Hey!

I'm looking round for a solution to an issue we face - cherrypicking cases. Rather than just working from oldest to newest case, people pick the case they want to do due to it being less work, or a quick win to boost their stats.

I have 2 ideas to resolve this and wondering if either are possible in osticket without major dev time.

1) replace the queue with a "grab ticket" button that just gets the oldest open, unassigned ticket and gives it to them (i found some code for this for a previous version but dont want to go copy/pasting 12 year old code just yet)

2) limit the view of agents to just the oldest unassigned ticket, with higher ranked agents being able to see the complete queue.

Any advise is welcome.
Thanks

ntozier

Both the ideas you cited could be good.

You will want to make sure that the button uses ticket priority and age to make sure that higher priority items are worked first. And you probably should not let end users select priority...
this can be done by using more and smaller buckets. (see Use a department tier system below)

Some other options:

Don't let the pick their own tickets. You could also have someone else do the ticket assigning.
(aka tickets get opened to a pre-assignment queue, and have a supervisor transfer and assign them)
You could use a 3rd party plugin (or write your own) that rotates assigning tickets to agents in a department.
(note: there used to be a 3rd party plugin or mod that did this, but I haven't seen anyone talk about it for a while.)
Here is an old forum post that has some old answers.
https://forum.osticket.com/d/92337-round-robin-agent-assignment
Use a department tier system.
If you have technicians who are tier 1 and tier 2 (and tier 3) this might work.
You create a Support Department - Tier 1.
All tickets go into it.
If a ticket is too difficult, explain to the staff that they need to transfer it to Support Department - Tier 2.
Tier 1 folks can only see and work the tier 1 queue.
Tier 2 folks can only see and work tickets in the tier 2 queue, so they cannot grab the fast and easy ones.

Note: Honestly, if the data metric you are using to determine productivity is how many tickets someone closes... then you should probably take a long hard look how you want to generate metrics for performance. Yes its useful, it doesn't paint a good picture for the same reason that you want to make sure that people aren't just grabbing and working the easy ones.