Other Incident Routing Conditions

Besides source, products, categories, and time created, you can route incidents based on several other conditions.

This list describes some of the more common incident conditions. For a complete list, see Incident Conditions.

• Subject and threads—You might want to find all incidents that contain a specific word or phrase or, conversely, exclude those incidents from being impacted by rule actions. You can set conditions to search for text in the incident subject as well as customer and staff threads.
  Note: When you create a rule comparing a string to the Incident Customer Thread, Incident Staff Thread, Incident Proposed Response, or Incident Summary, you can use the Limit buffer by option that appears to specify the number of characters of the string the rule will search for in the most recent entries, up to a maximum of 4000 characters. This can be helpful if you want to disregard initial standard text. If no value is entered, the entire thread is compared.
• Status—Setting the incident status as a rule condition lets you find and act on all incidents with the specified status. For example, you might want to send a reminder email to all customers who have an incident with the status Waiting.
• Previous fields—It might be useful to note when an incident status, assigned staff member or group, or escalation level changes during rules processing. You can specify the previous value (that is, the value for the field stored in the database when the incident is added or updated or when rules processing begins) for these fields as conditions for incident rules.
• Assigned staff member, group, or queue—If one of your staff members is out of the office unexpectedly, you might want to create a rule to reassign that person’s incidents. Similarly, one group or queue might have a heavier than normal volume of incidents and you might want to create a rule to direct some or all of those incidents to a different group or queue.
• SmartSense ratings—You might want to email incidents that have strongly positive customer SmartSense ratings to the staff member’s supervisor so that management can recognize agents who are serving customers well. It might also be useful to let management know when a staff member’s SmartSense rating is negative so corrective action can be taken if necessary. See SmartSense.

You can also route incidents based on rules you create using conditions for contacts and organizations. For example, you might want to route incidents based on a customer’s geographic region, the date your organization acquired them as a customer, or their industry.