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Explore recipe: Finding the first assignee for a ticket

Rob Stack
  • Edited
Zendesk Documentation Team

What's my plan?

Suite Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise PlusExplore Professional only

In this Explore recipe, you'll learn how to use the Updates history dataset to find the first agent a ticket was assigned to. You'll also create a filter that can be used to exclude results where the first assignee is the same as the current assignee.

What you'll need

Skill level: Intermediate

Time required: 20 minutes

Creating the report

This report returns the first assignee for each ticket in your instance.

To create the report

  1. In Explore, click the reports () icon.
  2. In the Reports library, click New report.
  3. On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Updates history, then click Start report.
  4. In the Calculations menu (), click Standard calculated attribute.
  5. On the Standard calculated attribute page, give your attribute a name like First assignee name.
  6. In the Formula field, enter or paste the following formula: 
    IF ([Changes - Field name]="assignee_id" AND [Changes - Previous value]=NULL 
AND [Changes - New value]!="0" AND [Changes - New value]!=NULL)
THEN [Update ticket assignee]
ENDIF
    Tip: If you're working in a language other than English, read this article to help you enter Explore formulas in your language.
  7. From the Computed from dropdown list, choose Ticket ID.
  8. When you are finished, click Save.
  9. Repeat steps 4 to 8 to create a second calculated attribute named Current assignee filter and the following formula: 
    IF [Update ticket assignee] = [Assignee name] THEN "true"
ELSE "false"
ENDIF
  10. Now, you'll construct the report. In the Metrics panel, click Add.
  11. From the list of metrics, choose Tickets > Tickets updated, then click Apply.
  12. In the Rows panel, click Add.
  13. From the list of attributes, choose Calculated attributes > First assignee name, then click Apply.
  14. In the Filters panel, click Add.
  15. From the list of attributes, choose Calculated attributes > Current assignee filter, then click Apply.
  16. Click the Current assignee filter you just added. On the Exclude tab, exclude one of the following values:
    • True: If you want to exclude tickets where the current ticket assignee is the same as the first tickets assignee.
    • False: If you want to exclude tickets where the current ticket assignee is NOT the same as the first tickets assignee.

Explore displays the finished table showing agents who were both the first and the current assignee for each ticket and the number of tickets for which that was the case. If you want to see the individual ticket IDs for these, add Tickets > Ticket ID to the Rows panel.

Tip: The Updates history dataset contains a large amount of information related to your tickets. If your report is taking too long to process, consider adding another filter to narrow the results. For example, you could add the Ticket created - Date filter to narrow the date range being reported.
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17 Comments

  • Ben Singer

    Hi team,

    Is it possible to find all assignees for a ticket?

    Thanks,

    Ben

    1
  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Ben,

    You should be able to report on this using the Ticket Updates dataset along with the Update Ticket Assignee attribute. This recipe may help: Explore recipe: Total number of assignments

    0
  • Kuka
    • Edited

    Hi team,

    So our team need the data from the tickets, specifically the first assignee of the tickets to make it easier to see an overview of ticket processing .

    Our team using Chatbot named Ivy and if using this query, it would trigger all ticket from live chat with Ivy as first assignee. could we exclude Ivy and utilize the second agent as first assignee?

    is there any logic that we can utilized to recognize our second assignee agent to sort out the ticket? some kind of logic that work like this:

    • IF first assignee = Ivy, then take the second, or
    • IF channel = livechat, THEN take the second assignee name

    Could we utilize that logic?

    Thanks,

    Kuka

    0
  • Marco
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Kautsar, 
     
    Thanks for reaching out regarding this. 
     
    I am not able to test this out as I would not have the same chatbot integration as you, and it looks like you are using a 3rd party bot that actually falls as an assignee. But I have some ideas on this. 
     
    First, we may need to actually separate the reporting on live chat tickets from the rest of the tickets. You can do that by filtering the report by ticket channel. Then when creating the report for tickets created from live chat, have you tried editing the formula so that instead of the assignee id being changed from NULL, it is changed from Ivy? Something like this: 
     
    IF ([Changes - Field name]="assignee_id" AND [Changes - Previous value]="Ivy Assignee ID" 
    AND [Changes - New value]!="0" AND [Changes - New value]!=NULL)
    THEN [Update ticket assignee]
    ENDIF
     
    Of course, you would change the "Ivy Assignee ID" to the actual assignee ID. Check here for more information: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408823393306-How-can-I-locate-an-agent-ID-in-Support-
     
    It may be possible to have this all in a single query, and having a custom attribute using the logic that you provided, but that extent of custom coding would be out of our scope. 
     
    Hope this helps! Cheers! 
    0
  • Crawford Philleo

    Hello - 

    I followed the steps here, but I'm not getting 100% the results I'm looking for in in my query results.

    I built a custom metric to show me the the number of tickets that are moved from a specific group into another group like this:

    IF([Changes - Field name]="group_id"
    AND [Changes - New value]="33422348" /* to Supervisors */
    AND [Changes - Previous value]="360010909133") /* from the prop-team */
    THEN [Update ticket ID]
    ENDIF

    In this case, it seems like the "First Assignee" attribute can't be bound to this in a table row - I would like to visually show who the first assignee on the ticket was prior to the ticket changing groups.

    In my example here, I isolated to a single ticket that should be included:

    So this is working for the "Tickets updated" metric, but I would like to have this also work for my custom "Upgrades" metric.

    1
  • Jay McCormack

    I utilized this Standard Calculated Metric a while ago to help me identify tickets moving from group to group. I now have a need for it to try to find some other information. It seems that the formula is now failing.

    If I run the original queries/reports that I initially used this metric in they seem to run fine. However, when I now select it from the list of metrics under columns or rows, I get the error below. 

    Can anybody shed some light on this?

     

    0
  • Alex Zheng
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hey Jay,
     
    You are probably in the wrong dataset, make sure you are in the Updates History dataset and the formula should work.
     
    Let me know if you have any further questions.
    0
  • Gerald J

    Is it possible to get the same information, first assignee name and hopefully group in the ticket and SLA dataset?

    0
  • Alex Zheng
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hey Gerald,
     
    Unfortunately not, as the changes - field name attribute only exists in the Updates History dataset.
     
    Best regards,
    0
  • Omkar Salyan

    Hi team,

    Is it possible to find all assignees for a ticket?

    or 

    get first assignee for a tickets in one column  and get second assignee for a tickets in second column.
    I am New to Zendesk Can any one help me with this?  

    Thanks,

    Omkar

    2
  • Pedro Rodrigues
    Community Moderator

    Hi Omkar Salyan, it is possible but it will require some work. Here's an example of how to do this.

    1. Create a new report under the Support - Updates history dataset

    2. Add the attribute [Changes - Field name] to Filters, and select "assignee_id"

    3.1. Create a standard calculated attribute, let's name it "Ticket Assignee • Previous", for example:

    IF ([Changes - Field name] = "assignee_id" 
         AND [Changes - Previous value] != NULL 
         AND [Changes - New value] != NULL
         AND [Changes - Previous value] != "0"
         AND [Changes - New value] != "0"
         AND [Changes - New value] != [Changes - Previous value]) 
    THEN LINK("https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/agent/users/"+[Changes - Previous value],"🔗 "+[Changes - Previous value])
    ENDIF

    ⚠️Don't forget to replace "yoursubdomain" with your actual Zendesk account subdomain.

    3.2. Create a second standard calculated attribute, "Ticket Assignee • New":

    IF ([Changes - Field name] = "assignee_id" 
         AND [Changes - Previous value] != NULL 
         AND [Changes - New value] != NULL
         AND [Changes - Previous value] != "0"
         AND [Changes - New value] != "0"
         AND [Changes - New value] != [Changes - Previous value]) 
    THEN LINK("https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/agent/users/"+[Changes - New value],"🔗 "+[Changes - New value])
    ENDIF

    4. Add the Assignee reassignments metric to the report

    5. Add the two new standard attributes to the report, exclude "NULL" values on both:

    The only downside is that this will return the user ID instead of the name, so we'd have to edit the previous standard attributes in order to obtain the agent's name.

    This will be a manual task, however, as we'll have to use a SWITCH function. Exemplifying for the "Ticket Assignee • Previous" attribute:

    IF ([Changes - Field name] = "assignee_id" 
         AND [Changes - Previous value] != NULL 
         AND [Changes - New value] != NULL
         AND [Changes - Previous value] != "0"
         AND [Changes - New value] != "0"
         AND [Changes - New value] != [Changes - Previous value]) 
    THEN SWITCH [Changes - Previous value] {
    CASE "123456789": LINK("https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/agent/users/"+[Changes - Previous value],"George")
    CASE "123456788": LINK("https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/agent/users/"+[Changes - Previous value],"Ringo")
    CASE "123456787": LINK("https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/agent/users/"+[Changes - Previous value],"John")
    CASE "123456786": LINK("https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/agent/users/"+[Changes - Previous value],"Paul")
    ⚠️ (...)
    DEFAULT: [Changes - Previous value]}
    ENDIF

    ⚠️ You should add a "CASE" value for each agent in your account. This makes the whole report more difficult to maintain, of course, depending on how many agents you have.

    Result:

    In the example image above, we can see that there are CASE conditions for two agent IDs, but we'd need to edit our two attributes and add more CASE conditions for the other user IDs.

    Hope this helps!

    2
  • Omkar Salyan

    Thanks for the response Pedro Rodrigues . it helped a lot.

    can you help me with one one more thing like how to just get first assignee name of a ticket and name of last agent who have updated the ticket .

    apologies for the late response and again thanks for the response .

    Omkar Salyan

    0
  • Pedro Rodrigues
    Community Moderator

    Hi Omkar Salyan, you can follow the steps shared on this page to report on first assignee. As for the last assignee, you can try the following standard calculated attribute (also in the Updates history dataset):

    IF [Assignee name] != NULL
    THEN [Assignee name]
    ELIF [Changes - Field name]="assignee_id" 
    AND [Changes - Previous value] != NULL 
    AND ([Changes - New value] = "0" OR [Changes - New value] = NULL)
    THEN [Changes - Previous value]
    ENDIF

    Hope this helps!

    0
  • Allen Lai | Head of CX, Otter.ai

    I'm using the "Bad initial satisfaction ratings" metric to find negative C-SAT data based on the first assignee and this is not working for us. All of the numbers are associated with a blank value under "First Assignee Name".

    0
  • Gab Guinto
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Allen,

    If you're using the Bad initial satisfaction ratings in your report and you need to see which agent was assigned at that time of the rating, you can try slicing the data by the native Update ticket assignee attribute instead of the custom one discussed above. This should show the assignee at the time the bad rating was added to the ticket. 
    0
  • Anais

    Hi, 

    The first reply metric is attributed to the current assignee / group even if it wasn't them who did that first answer (we actually got a separate group that triages most tickets).

    Is there a way to see how long it took to send the first reply and attribute it to the agent who actually wrote that first reply?

    Thanks

    0
  • Gab Guinto
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Anais,

    This may be achievable through the Updates history dataset. You can try building a custom attribute using the earliest date functions to get the timestamp of the first agent reply – see Working with earliest and latest date functions – and then use the Updater name attribute to see the agent who performed the update. 
    0

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