Using Agent Affinity
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- UpdatedJan 30, 2025
- 3 minutes to read
- Yokohama
- Advanced Work Assignment
Agent Affinity is an Advanced Work Assignment feature that lets you assign work items by an agent's work history, related task, or account team affinity.
Advanced Work Assignment assigns work items to agents by their availability, capacity, and skills. You can use Agent Affinity to customize this AWA assignment process and identify the agent best suited for the work item. Agent Affinity ensures that the same agent is assigned to a similar work item instead of orienting a new agent every time.
- Historical
- Identifies the best agent based on the agent's history of serving the same customer.
- Related task
- Identifies the best agent based on the agent's past assignments of related tasks.
- Account team
- Identifies the best agent based on the agent's responsibility or role in the account team.
The following example shows how AWA uses Agent Affinity to determine the best agent for a work item. In this example, AWA is configured to use all three affinities in this order: related task affinity, account team affinity, and historical affinity. George Warren, who is a customer at the Boxeo company, has a router problem. George previously contacted support to report an issue. That case was assigned to agent Ned. The primary support agent for Boxeo is agent John. Within the past seven days, another agent, agent Beth, addressed a chat with Boxeo.
The next time George initiates a customer service chat from the case page, the case is automatically added as a related task to the chat interaction. Agent Affinity uses the related task affinity to look for an agent who has fulfilled past assignments for a related task. Because agent Ned was assigned to a related task on the record, AWA assigns the work item to agent Ned if available with capacity.

If agent Ned is unavailable or doesn't have the capacity, AWA uses the account team affinity. AWA looks for another agent based on an agent's responsibility or role in the account team. Because agent John is the primary support agent for the Boxeo company, AWA assigns the work item to Agent John if available with capacity.


Related Content
- Advanced Work Assignment home page
Explore, implement, and maintain ServiceNow Advanced Work Assignment using a home-page experience. Discover AWA, install relevant plugins, and configure settings for AWA through the Advanced Work Assignment home page available to admins.
- Get started with Advanced Work Assignment
To implement Advanced Work Assignment, complete these initial configuration and setup steps.
- Install Conversational SMS service channel
You can install the Conversational SMS service channel application (sn_awa_sms_int) if you have the admin role. The application installs related ServiceNow Store applications and plugins if they are not already installed.
- Activate Agent Affinity
You can activate the Agent Affinity plugin (com.glide.awa.agent_affinity) if you have the admin role.
- Activate Conversational Messaging
You can activate the Conversational Messaging plugin (com.glide.messaging.awa) if you have the admin role.
- Service channels
Provide customer support by automatically routing incoming work to agents through service channels.
- Work items
View Advanced Work Assignment work items using the Work Items menu options.
- Work assignments
After routing work items to the appropriate queues and corresponding agent groups, Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) pushes work to the most qualified agent using the assignment criteria that you specify. Assignment criteria revolve around the type of assignment rule (most capacity or last assigned) and whether skills are defined.
- Agent Inbox controls
Control certain elements of the agent experience in Agent Workspace. Define the agent presence (availability) states and the work item rejection reasons used by agents to decline work assignments in their Agent Workspace inbox.
- Advanced Work Assignment Inbox Sentiment display
Surface the sentiment in AWA Inbox for agents to get the visibility of requester sentiment ( if available) during live agent handoff or agent transfer for all channels.
- Wrap up overview
When agents close an interaction, the wrap up feature enables them to enter closing details and wrap up codes for future reference.
- Management
Configure Advanced Work Assignment properties using the Management menu options.
- Configure messaging actions
Create or modify messaging actions that are performed when an event occurs. These actions apply only to messaging.
- Enable logging for Advanced Work Assignment
Enable logging to monitor AWA routing and assignment.