Comment required even when assigning Request to oneself

[Frank Reay]

We have recently switched this ON:

This is all good, however when a Request is assigned to a Team and an Agent then assigns it to himself he needs to make a Comment. The agents get a bit annoyed by this. I presume this is expected behaviour but can the system be more intuitive (ie the same as when the system does not send an email if an Agent assigns to himself).

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Frank, 

The behavior here when this setting is turned on is to help with tracking reasons for the assignment and it applies to everyone.  I'm curious why this wouldn't apply to someone assigning to themselves?  If there is a need to provide a reason for an assignment, and I was to assign a request to myself, wouldn't a team lead or team members still require this information? "I've assigned this incident to myself as I'm familiar with the issue"

In your use case, is it being used as a hand-off comment from the current owner to the new owner rather than auditing or compliance?

[Frank Reay]

Thanks @James Ainsworth

It is more as a hand-off comment - we don't have any audit or compliance requirement here. If someone is handing over to another team or person then it is just good manners to explain why and put it in context. We have too many analysts who just 'throw it over the wall' without any explanation (despite us telling them not to and complaining when other people do it to them!). Being forced to add a comment actually makes people stop and think about what they are doing.

Assigning to yourself is different and by inference you are stating that you are familiar with the issues and/or have the time to investigate. HB has the clever functionality to stop emails when assigning to yourself and in my head this is the same principle.

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Both,

Sorry to jump on this one, but strangely enough this is something we just happened to be discussing here, and we would want to turn on, but I would also agree with Frank in that if an Analyst assigns to themselves it would normally indicate they are going to deal. However, I can also see the benefit of making the Analyst confirm it is assigned to them to action as James has confirmed, just so other Users can see what is happening on a request clearly.

I have previously asked for Snippets to be included on the Update node, is there anyway we could have a Snippet to use here against Assignment, as if we had a Snippet selection for the User to insert it would more than likely lower any noise around the frustration of having to update a reason when they assign it to themselves. 

Or maybe a setting to turn off this feature for assigning to myself?

Many thanks

Adrian

[Steve Giller]

When assigning it to yourself the purpose of the comment would be for someone other than the owner viewing the timeline, not for the owner themselves who (as you correctly state) already knows this.

[Frank Reay]

I would expect the new owner to update the Request with a comment under the standard update tab when they have something meaningful to add. The comment within the assignment tab is a comment about why they are making that assignment - which seems pointless when they are assigning it to themself. 

[Steve Giller]

@Frank Reay The comment within the assignment tab is only meaningless to the Owner - as James mentioned, when assigning to yourself that comment is for a Team Member or Team Leader etc. to understand why they took on the Request.
As a Team Lead, in the same way that you might look at my Request and ask "Why did James give that to Steve?" and see the note says "Passed it to Steve because I'm busy doing really clever programming stuff" you would look at James's Request and ask "Why didn't James give that to Steve?" - in this scenario the comment would let you know that James took the Request himself because he knows I'll be off next week and unable to progress that Request.