Assignment & Routing

Assignment records who owns a conversation. One person at a time, or nobody.

It matters more than it looks. An unowned conversation is one everybody assumes someone else is handling, and the difference between a team that answers in ten minutes and one that answers in two days is usually a routing problem, not an effort problem.

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The three ways an assignee is set

Someone assigns it. From the conversation sidebar, in bulk from the conversation list, or as a macro action.

An agent replies. Replying assigns the conversation to whoever sent the reply — even if a colleague had it. Whoever is talking to the customer owns the conversation.

An agent closes it. Closing assigns the conversation to whoever closed it, if it wasn't already assigned to them.

Admin accounts are excluded from the last two, so an admin can answer a question or tidy the queue without silently taking ownership of everything they touch.

If your workspace has automatic distribution switched on, there is a fourth: conversations are assigned as they're escalated, before anyone touches them.

When an assignee is removed

Manually. The assignee survives closing, reopening and snoozing. A conversation that comes back three weeks later comes back to the same person. That's usually what you want, since they have the context, but it does mean an agent who leaves takes a queue with them unless someone reassigns it.

There is one optional exception: workspaces can be configured so that when an agent goes off shift, their open conversations are released back to the unassigned pool rather than waiting for them to return. Whether that's right depends on your team — it gets work moving overnight, at the cost of losing the continuity of one person owning a thread. It's off unless you ask for it.

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Automatic distribution

Each business runs one of three policies:

Balanced is the better default for most teams. Round-robin distributes evenly by count, which drifts out of fairness as soon as some conversations take much longer than others; balanced self-corrects because a slow conversation keeps counting against its owner until it's finished.

Distribution runs when a conversation is handed off, and a sweep also picks up anything that was escalated while nobody was eligible. It never reassigns a conversation that already has an owner.

Who counts as available

An agent is eligible only if they are marked as an agent, not archived, and not marked unavailable. Two optional layers narrow it further:

• Working hours — when enabled, only agents currently inside their configured hours receive work.
• Activity-based availability — when enabled, only agents active in the last five minutes receive work. Useful for live chat, where a conversation assigned to someone who stepped away is a customer waiting on nobody.

If nobody is eligible, the conversation stays unassigned and is picked up by the sweep once someone becomes available.

Caps

Two limits stop a single agent from being buried:

• Max open tickets — a hard ceiling per agent. Note this applies to non-email channels only.
• A working-hours cap — when working hours are on, an agent's ceiling scales down as their shift ends, so nobody is handed a pile of new work ten minutes before they log off.

Open conversations count toward both. Snoozed, closed and spam conversations don't.

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Assignment rules

Policies decide who among the eligible. Assignment rules decide which pool is eligible in the first place — this is how a conversation reaches the right team rather than just the next free person.

A rule is a set of conditions plus a target. Conditions can match on:

business · channel · priority · tags · email inbox · topics · language · sentiment · collected data values

All conditions on a rule must match. Rules are evaluated in priority order and the first full match wins.

A rule can target:

• A specific person — they're assigned directly, and the distribution policy is skipped entirely. Use this when one named individual must handle something, which is the point of an individual rule.
• A team — the candidate pool narrows to that team, then round-robin or balanced picks the agent from it.

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Teams

A team is a named group of people. Teams do three things:

• Scope assignment rules — route a category of work to a group rather than an individual.
• Scope views — a team view appears in that team's folder and only for its members.
• Organize the sidebar — each team gets its own section.

By default people see only the teams they belong to. The view all teams permission lifts that, for supervisors who need the whole picture.

Teams are worth creating as soon as different groups of people handle genuinely different work — by language, by brand, or by tier. Below that, one pool and a balanced policy is simpler and works fine.

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Per-agent settings

Each user carries settings that feed the routing above:

• Working hours — a weekly schedule in the agent's own timezone, with as many slots per day as you need. Alongside it you can record time off for holidays, and set a one-off offline until or overtime until override when someone leaves early or covers a late shift. Only used when working hours are enabled for the organization.
• Marked as unavailable — a switch each agent controls themselves, from their avatar menu at the bottom of the navigation. It takes them out of distribution without touching their schedule, which makes it the right tool for a sick day or heads-down time. An agent who is outside their working hours shows as unavailable regardless.
• Agent — whether the person receives conversations at all. Managers who only read reports don't need it.
• Archived — removes a departed teammate from distribution while keeping their history intact.

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Choosing a setup

Start simpler than you think you need. Rules are easy to add once you can see where the work actually goes, and a routing setup nobody understands is worse than none.