Routing and teams
Routing decides which person a ticket lands with. It runs on its own, from the settings you choose. Nothing here asks for approval.
Create a routing team
Routing teams are created on one page: Settings → Help Desk → Service Levels, in the Teams card.
Click Add team.
Enter a Team name (for example, Support).
Pick an Assignment strategy:
Balanced assigns the teammate with the fewest open conversations.
Round robin rotates through teammates in turn.
Manual leaves conversations in the team queue for someone to claim.
Click Create team.
Under Members on the team's card, click each teammate who should take this team's work.
A team with no members has nowhere to send a conversation, so it waits in the queue. The card shows each team's member count and how many are available right now. You can archive a team you no longer use and restore it later. Archiving pauses the live chat routing rules that point at it, until you restore it. It does not change the ticket Routing Rules or the Default team under ticket settings → Routing. If one of those still points at the archived team, tickets keep landing in its queue and wait unassigned. Point them at another team before you archive.
Everything that sends work to a team picks from this list: chat widget hand-offs, ticket routing rules, and the default and escalation teams below.
Note: routing teams are not the same as the Teams you manage under Settings → People. Routing teams exist only to route Help Desk work.
How assignment picks a person
When a ticket lands on a team, the engine looks at each member's availability and capacity, then applies the strategy. A member who is Away, or already at capacity, is skipped. If nobody is eligible, the ticket stays in the team queue and is assigned as soon as someone frees up.
Capacity is the number of open tickets a person can hold. The organization default is 10. Set a personal limit per operator under Operator Capacity on the Routing tab of ticket settings (leave it blank to use the default).
Routing & Capacity settings
Open the ticket settings gear in the inbox, go to Routing, change what you need, and click Save.
Auto-assign by team strategy. Turn automatic assignment on or off.
Only assign in team business hours. Off by default. When on, a ticket that arrives outside the team's hours waits in the queue instead of pinging someone who is off.
Reassign on first-response breach. Pull back a breached, untouched ticket and hand it to the next eligible teammate.
Reassign if no response in (min). If the assignee has not responded in this many minutes, the ticket is pulled back and handed to the next eligible teammate who has not already had it. Blank means off. By default this applies to chat widget tickets only; email is left alone because a short timer would thrash a channel where replies take hours. Click a channel under the field to add or remove it.
Escalate to team when chain exhausts. When every teammate has been tried, send the ticket to this team next. Otherwise it drops to the Unassigned queue.
Notify managers when no one picks it up. One notification when the chain runs out with nobody to take the ticket.
Default capacity (open tickets/operator).
Default team. Where tickets go when no rule claims them. Leave it empty to keep them unrouted.
Routing rules
Still under Routing, the Routing Rules (First Match Wins) list routes tickets that have no team yet. Each rule has subject keywords, a channel (or Any channel), and the team to send it to. Rules run in order; the first match wins. A ticket no rule matches goes to the default team.
If nobody responds
Put together, the chain works like this:
The ticket is assigned by the team strategy.
If the assignee does not respond within the reassign window, the ticket moves to the next eligible teammate.
When the team is exhausted, it goes to the escalation team if you set one, or back to the unassigned queue.
Managers are notified if you turned that on.
For live chat, the chat widget has its own hand-off chain for the moments before a ticket is picked up. See Scenarios and handoff rules.
Taking over and handing back
Assigning a ticket to a person by hand pauses the AI on that conversation. Automatic routing does not pause it. To hand a ticket back to the AI, choose your AI agent (marked AI) in the assignee picker.