Chat Assignments #

Overview #

Chat assignments let you decide which person on your team owns a given conversation. When a chat is assigned to someone, it’s clear who is responsible for replying, who customers should hear back from, and who to follow up with internally if something falls through the cracks.

Use assignments to:

• Establish ownership so no chat is left waiting because everyone assumed someone else would handle it.
• Create accountability by making it visible who picked up which conversation.
• Split the inbox between team members instead of having everyone monitor the same shared queue.
• Hand off conversations cleanly when a teammate goes on break, on holiday, or shifts focus.

Assignments are visible in two places: a small initial badge on each chat row in the inbox list, and an “Assigned to {name}” line in the chat header when a conversation is open.

By default an assignment says who owns a chat; it doesn’t hide anything from anyone else. If you’d rather a particular team member saw only their own conversations, that’s a setting on their team seat — see Limiting a Member to Their Own Chats.

Where is the inbox? Everything on this page happens in Chats, under the Engage group in the sidebar. (On a phone, tap the menu icon ☰ first, then tap Chats.)

Assigning a Single Chat to a Teammate #

1. Open the conversation you want to assign in Chats.
2. Click the three-dot menu (⋯) in the top-right of the conversation header.

3. Select Assign to teammate….
4. The assignee picker opens with a list of everyone on your team who has access to this account.

5. Choose the person you want to own the chat.
6. The assignment saves instantly. The chat header updates to show “Assigned to {name}” and the row in the chat list picks up the assignee’s initial badge.

You can self-assign by picking your own name. This is useful when you start replying to a chat manually and want to claim it before anyone else jumps in.

Note: Only people who are currently active team members appear in the picker. Suspended or removed members are filtered out so a chat can’t accidentally be parked on someone who no longer has inbox access.

Bulk Assignment #

Chats supports selecting multiple conversations at once for actions like pausing the AI, archiving, or tagging — see Bulk Inbox Actions. Assign is one of those bulk actions: select every chat you want to hand off, click Assign, and pick the teammate who should own all of them in one go.

If you’d rather split a queue between several different teammates instead of assigning everything to one person, the typical workflow is:

1. In Chats, click Filters, open the Assignee section, and pick Unassigned to see what’s currently up for grabs.
2. Open each chat, assign it to the teammate who should own it, and move to the next one.
3. Each teammate then switches the filter to their own name to focus on their own queue.

Reassigning to a Different Teammate #

Reassignment uses the same flow as the first assignment:

1. Open the chat.
2. Click the three-dot menu in the top-right.
3. Select Assign to teammate….
4. Pick a different teammate.
5. The new assignee replaces the old one. The chat header and inbox badge update immediately.

To clear an assignment entirely and return the chat to the unassigned queue:

1. Open the chat.
2. Click the three-dot menu and select Assign to teammate….
3. In the picker, choose Unassigned.
4. The chat is no longer owned by anyone and will appear when you filter to Unassigned.

There is no audit trail in the UI for reassignment, so if hand-offs are sensitive in your team, leave a quick note inside the chat (or on the contact) explaining why ownership changed.

Filtering the Inbox by Assignee #

Click the Filters button (the funnel icon at the start of the filter row) above the chat list and choose the Assignee section — it sits alongside Status, Campaign or Agent, List, Tags, and Channel. See Chat Interface.

The options are:

Your own name is easy to spot: it’s marked (you) and sits directly under Unassigned, at the top of the list.

Selecting an option re-filters the list immediately, and the choice shows as a chip in the filter row. Click the × on that chip to return to the full inbox. If you check the same queue every day, click the pin icon beside your name in the Assignee list and it becomes a permanent one-click chip — see Pin your own quick filters. And if your own queue is where you always want to start, filter to your name and click Set as default at the top of the Filters panel — Chats will open pre-filtered to your chats from then on. See Save your default view.

Auto-Assignment Rules #

A few assignments happen automatically so chats don’t sit unowned in obvious cases. There is no per-tag routing and no per-channel routing today, and the auto-assignments only ever kick in when there’s no existing assignee. Optionally, you can also turn on round-robin sharing for brand-new contacts (see below).

When a chat triggers a Human Alert #

If the AI decides a chat needs a real person and flags it for human attention, and the chat has no assignee at that moment, the system automatically assigns it to the account owner. This makes sure the alerted chat shows up in someone’s queue instead of sitting unassigned.

If the chat is already assigned to a teammate when the alert fires, the existing assignment is kept — auto-assignment never overwrites a manual choice.

The alert also pauses the AI on that conversation, and it stays paused until someone switches it back on — see When the AI paused itself. Assigning the chat to someone else does not resume it.

Spreading new contacts across the team (round-robin) #

By default chats are not rotated across teammates. But if you turn on Assign new contacts automatically in Settings → Team (under the Auto-assign new contacts card), each brand-new contact’s first message is handed to the teammate (including you) with the fewest contacts assigned in the last 30 days. This only applies to brand-new contacts on their very first message — existing contacts and human-alerted chats are unaffected.

Not everyone has to take part. Each person in the team list — including you — has an Include in auto-assignment switch, so a teammate who is only there to supervise and review chats can be left out of the rotation while keeping full access to the inbox. See Choosing who takes part for the details.

What’s not automatic #

• No tag-based routing. Tags don’t trigger an assignment.
• No channel-based routing. Instagram chats are not auto-routed to a different person than WhatsApp chats.
• Pausing the AI does not claim the chat for you. Turning AI off on a chat only stops the bot from replying — it does not assign the chat to anyone. If you want it in your queue, assign it to yourself explicitly (see above).

If you want chats spread across the team, turn on Assign new contacts automatically (above) for new contacts, or use manual/bulk assignment for everything else.

Notifications When a Chat Is Assigned to You #

When a chat ends up in your queue — because someone assigned it to you manually, a human alert seeded it to you as the account owner, or round-robin auto-assign picked you for a new contact — it shows up the next time you filter Chats to your own name.

For real-time signals, make sure your notification channels are turned on. New messages on assigned chats reach you the same way as new messages on any chat you have access to — see Notifications.

If you’re a manager reviewing someone else’s queue, switch the Assignee filter to that teammate’s name to see what they’re working on.

Best Practices #

• One person per chat. Pick a single owner so customers get a consistent voice and so teammates don’t accidentally double-reply. If a conversation genuinely needs two people, leave a note inside the chat about who handles which part.
• Claim before you reply. When you start helping a customer, assign the chat to yourself first. It signals to the rest of the team that the chat is being handled.
• Use Unassigned as the team queue. Filter to Unassigned regularly to see what’s still up for grabs.
• Do a hand-off cleanly. Before going on break or holiday, reassign your active chats to a teammate (or back to Unassigned so anyone can pick them up). Don’t leave conversations parked on someone who’s not online.
• Audit weekly. Once a week, filter to each teammate’s name to make sure nobody is sitting on stale chats they meant to hand off. Reassign anything that’s been ignored for too long.
• Trust the auto-assignments. When the AI alerts for human attention, the chat lands on the account owner automatically. Use that as your signal to either handle it personally or hand it off to the right teammate.

Need Help? #

If you have questions about chat assignments or run into issues, reach out via our email support.