Working at scale. Bulk operations let you process many tickets at once; Smart-Assign lets the system pick the right assignee when you only know the level (UP / SIDEWAYS / DOWN), not the person. Together they're how a dispatcher clears a hundred tickets in two minutes instead of an hour.
Problem: A flood of similar tickets just landed — twenty alerts from the same RMM, a batch of tickets that all need to go to the same team, a dozen tickets that all should run through the same triage policy. Doing them one at a time would burn an hour. Doing them in bulk takes thirty seconds.
Horizon's answer: Every action that makes sense to do across many tickets has a bulk version on the Ticket Board. Select the tickets, pick the bulk action, fill the form once, submit — every selected ticket gets the same treatment.
Selecting tickets
Selecting "all visible" only selects the rows on the current page. If you want all 200 tickets in the filtered view, change the page size to a higher number first (or use the "Select all matching" prompt if Filament shows one when you have multi-page selection).
The four bulk actions
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Bulk Direct Assign | Pick one team + one agent. Every selected ticket goes to that pair. |
| Bulk Smart Assign | Pick a single direction (UP / SIDEWAYS / DOWN). Each ticket re-routes individually based on its own context. Smart-Assign itself is covered in the second half of this lesson. |
| Bulk Add to Queue | Pick a queue. Every selected ticket gets dropped into that queue for pull-based pickup. |
| Bulk Run Triage | Pick a triage policy. Each ticket gets the policy's recommendations applied. Triage itself is covered in a later lesson. |
Bulk Direct Assign — when to use it
When you have a batch of tickets that should all go to the same person. Common cases:
The whole batch goes to the same team + agent pair. If you need different agents for different tickets, use Smart Assign or do Direct Assign one at a time.
Bulk Smart Assign — when to use it
When you have a batch of tickets that all need the same kind of routing but not necessarily the same person. Common cases:
The system picks individually per ticket — different tickets may end up with different assignees, all chosen by the routing rules.
Bulk Add to Queue — when to use it
When you have a batch of low-priority work that should sit in a queue for agents to pull. Common case: a flood of RMM alerts — select them all, push them into the alerts queue, walk away.
Bulk Run Triage — when to use it
When you have a batch of tickets that haven't been triaged (or were triaged but are stale), and you want the system to set priority/type/routing for all of them at once. Common case: imported tickets from a migration that need triage policies applied retroactively.
Workflow patterns
A typical morning Ticket Board session:
Five bulk actions can clear a hundred tickets in two minutes. Going one at a time would take an hour.
Common mistakes
Tip: The bulk tools reward dispatchers who think in clusters. If you're walking the All Unassigned list reading each ticket individually and direct-assigning one-by-one, you're doing it wrong. Glance at the list, group by similarity, bulk-act on each group. The mental shift from "one ticket at a time" to "groups of similar tickets" is the biggest lever you have for being efficient.
Problem: Direct Assign works when you know exactly who should work a ticket. But often you don't — you just know it should go up (more senior team), down (less senior), or sideways (same level, different person). Picking a specific name in those cases is a guess; you'd rather let the system pick the best fit using your routing rules.
Horizon's answer: Smart-Assign. Same underlying mechanism as automatic dispatch and escalation, but you trigger it manually. You pick a direction (UP / SIDEWAYS / DOWN); Horizon picks the actual team and assignee using your account's routing rules.
The three directions
| Direction | What it does | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| UP | Routes to a more senior tier or specialist team | Ticket is beyond the current handler's skill, scope, or authority. The customer needs senior attention. The ticket is stuck and a more experienced agent could unstick it. |
| SIDEWAYS | Routes to the same tier, different agent | The current handler can't continue (out, overloaded, on something else) but the ticket doesn't need senior attention. A peer can handle it. |
| DOWN | Routes to a less senior tier | The ticket turned out to be simpler than its initial routing suggested. Push it back down so a tier-1 agent can knock it out and free up the senior. |
Smart-assign a single ticket
The ticket re-routes through your account's assignment plugins. Horizon picks the right team and assignee based on the direction and the routing rules — same logic dispatch uses for fully-automatic assignment.
Smart-assign in bulk
Each ticket re-routes individually based on the chosen direction. The system picks the right assignee for each ticket using its own context — they don't all go to the same person.
Smart Assign vs. Direct Assign
| Direct Assign | Smart Assign | |
|---|---|---|
| You pick | Team and agent | Direction only |
| System picks | Nothing | Team and agent |
| Use when | You know the right person | You know the level but not the person |
| Best for | High-context tickets, customer requests | High-volume routing, ambiguous assignments |
A typical dispatcher's morning: Direct-assign the obvious ones (where context tells you exactly who), Smart-assign the ambiguous ones (where the routing rules know better than you do).
Smart Assign vs. automatic dispatch / escalation
The mechanism is identical — same routing rules, same plugins, same skip-the-Out-agents logic. The only difference is who triggers it:
If your account is heavily automated, you'll smart-assign rarely (only when you spot edge cases). If it's mostly manual, smart-assign is your bread-and-butter for ambiguous tickets.
Direction matters more than dispatchers usually think
Common errors
Tip: Always include a short note when you smart-assign. The direction tells the system where to send it; the note tells the receiving agent why it's coming. "Smart-assigned UP — needs domain admin access I don't have" saves the receiving agent from re-discovering everything you already learned. The same goes for DOWN: "Pushed back down — turned out to just be a password reset, not the network problem we thought" keeps the tier-1 agent from over-thinking a simple ticket.