There are always more efficient ways to serve your customers. Perhaps the most important part of the process is the first part: collecting information from the customer and Routing where that information goes. When it comes to IT service management, users don’t always know exactly how to describe their issues, how to categorize them, or which troubleshooting steps they should take before they enlist a technician. Automation is a great way to cut out unnecessary tasks born out of a user’s confusion when filling out a Ticket. And once you’ve setup some rules to help collect information, you can automate some of your early determinations based on that information.

While some of these ideas may seem like tiny, little time-savers, an effective campaign of routing automations can relieve a significant burden from your service desk, and ultimately, lead to more satisfied customers.

Here are five automations you can already implement to improve the early stages of your tickets’ lifecycles:

Routing by Category – If your service management solution is worth its weight, it will help your users determine categories based on your organization’s history of tickets. So, since you’re receiving categorized tickets, don’t waste someone’s time manually routing them to the appropriate technician. Create automations that assign tickets to specific service agents for every category within your organization. Bob handles all the security tickets? Bob receives all the security tickets upon submission.

VIP Automations – When a C-level executive submits an incident or service request, it’s critical priority. No need to make them check a box, or to make a service desk agent read it and decide where it goes. Set up an automation rule that says, “anything coming from the CEO is critical.” Many organizations want a specific technician to handle all of the boss’s tickets, which you can create a rule for as well.

Routing by Site and/or Department – Global organizations have complicated service management needs. Users in Australia function on a different clock than users in the United States. You’ll want to get tickets from different locations or different departments routed to the correct technicians. You guessed it: You can setup automation rules for that.

Routing Keywords – There are likely words that appear in tickets so commonly that they deserve to be handled by a specialist. Maybe your sales team submits a high volume of tickets about the CRM platform they use. You can easily create an automation rule that routes any ticket containing the word “Salesforce” to the agent who specializes in Salesforce.

Custom Field Routing – This is a great place to be creative, and to tailor the automations to your organization’s needs. Maybe your users have device-specific needs. You can create a field that asks for the type of device when they submit tickets, then routes those tickets according to the answer. Perhaps there are users who can’t get it through their heads that a monitor simply needs to be unplugged and plugged back in to establish connection. “Have you unplugged it?” is an appropriate custom field in this case, and then you can automatically route the ticket based on the answer. If the user can take a hint (duh, maybe you should unplug it), you might save the trouble of creating a ticket in the first place.

Data collection and analysis are vital to any organization. Service management solutions are evolving to rely less on human technicians for the early, tedious steps of this process. Through automation, you can remove almost all of the early frustrations concerning ticket routing, freeing up your technicians to actually serve your customers.

If you’d like to learn more about automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for your service desk, watch our free webinar on-demand.