Assignment rules let you automatically route tickets to the right group when they’re escalated to a human agent. Rules can be based on ticket categories, so that different types of requests reach the team best equipped to handle them.
How Assignment Rules Work
When a ticket is escalated from Serval AI to a human agent, the assignment process follows this order:
- Assignment rules — Serval AI analyzes the ticket content, infers a category, and assigns the ticket to the group mapped to that category
- Default assignment — By default, all tickets are unassigned or assigned to a group of users of your choice.
- Guidance — define in natural language how Serval should assign tickets.
- Unassigned — If no rules or guidance are configured, the ticket remains unassigned until manually claimed
Default Assignment
Every team has a default assignment setting. Under this setting:
- “All tickets” remain unassigned if the default assignment is set to unassigned, or
- By changing the default assignment, “All tickets” can be assigned to a single group.
Even when using custom assignment rules, it’s a good idea to set a default assignment group. This ensures tickets that don’t match any rules still get routed to someone rather than remain unassigned.
Creating Assignment Rules
We support custom assignment rules by category. Once you have categories configured, you can map categories to the group that should handle those tickets.
Open assignment settings
Go to Team Settings → Assignment.
Add a rule
Click Add Rule on the assignment settings page.
Select a category
Choose a category from the dropdown.
Select assignees
Choose the groups or users that should receive tickets matching that category.
Managing Rules
Updating a Rule
To change assignees, click the assignee selector on the rule and choose different groups or users.
Deleting a Rule
Click the X button next to a rule to remove it.
How Members Are Selected
Assignment rules can target multiple users and groups, which are all combined and deduplicated into a single pool.
When a ticket is routed into an assignment rule, Serval will randomly select a user from the pool to assign the ticket to.
Each user in this pool has an equal chance of being selected. 
