Assigning jobs to the right service providers as soon as possible is crucial to making sure your availability is as right as possible. By default, when a new job is booked, it stays unassigned until it's manually assigned by you or another teammate with the appropriate permissions.
Overview
Auto-assign is enabled at the service level, meaning you have full control over what types of work can be automatically assigned and what types of work requires manual dispatch.
When auto-assign is enabled for a service that a customer books online, that new job will automatically assigned to the required number of service providers who possess the required skill tags. If service territories are enabled in your account, only providers who work in the job's territory will be eligible to be automatically assigned.
Note: When auto-assign is enabled for a service, it will only be applied to online bookings for that service. Jobs created from the Zenbooker admin still need to be manually assigned, or offered to service providers.
Enabling auto-assign for a service
From your Zenbooker admin, navigate to Services and select a service.
Click Team Requirements & Assignment Options.
Select any skills required for the service. Adding required skill tags helps ensure the right provider(s) get assigned, since only providers who possess all required skills will be eligible for auto-assignment.
Select the required number of service providers. This determines how many providers will be automatically assigned per job for this service.
Under Assignment & job offers select Automatically assign
Click Save
How auto-assign determines who to assign
When a service is booked with auto-assign enabled, Zenbooker will first determine which providers are eligible and available to be auto-assigned:
Eligible: The service provider has all required skill tags, work in the job's service territory, and auto-assign is enabled in their profile.
Available: The job is scheduled to occur during their regular recurring work hours and they have no conflicting assignments already assigned.
Zenbooker will then assign the required number of providers who meet the above requirements.
If there are more than the needed number of eligible providers available for a given job, Zenbooker can pick which provider(s) to assign in one of the following ways:
Balanced (default)
After calculating the list of eligible and available service providers, Zenbooker will shuffle the list and auto-assign the job to the required number of providers picked at random. This ensures that jobs are distributed equitably among available providers.
Prioritized
After calculating the list of eligible and available service providers, Zenbooker will auto-assign the job to the highest priority service provider(s). When prioritized is enabled, you can rearrange your service providers to adjust their priority.
Based on Drive Time and Distance
This method, available for businesses on the Zenbooker Enterprise plan and above, automatically assigns jobs based on drive time, using the location of a provider's preceding assignment or their next scheduled job to estimate proximity. For providers without current jobs, their start address is used.
Tip: For the Drive Time and Distance method, setting a start location for all providers is key. It helps accurately include providers without scheduled jobs in assignments. Without a start location, these providers could be incorrectly prioritized, affecting assignments.
You can edit the method used for auto-assign in Settings > Job Assignment > Auto-Assignment
Restricting which providers can be auto-assigned
You can prevent certain service providers from having any jobs auto-assigned to them.
To disable auto-assign for a service provider:
From your Zenbooker admin, navigate to Team and select a service service provider.
Toggle "Can be auto-assigned jobs" to off.
