Routing & skills
Routing decides how an escalated conversation reaches an agent. Set it under Dashboard → Settings → Escalation → Routing Strategy. Only online, active agents (with the Agent, Admin, or Owner role) are ever eligible for auto-assignment.
🖼️ [Image] — The four routing strategy options with the "Max conversations per agent" field below.
The four strategies
| Strategy | How it assigns |
|---|---|
| Manual claim | No auto-assignment. Conversations land in Unassigned and agents pick them up from the Inbox. |
| Round-robin | Rotates evenly across online agents. |
| Load-balanced | Assigns to the least-busy online agent (fewest active conversations). |
| Skill-based | Matches the conversation's suggested skills to agents who have them. Falls back to load-balanced when no agent matches. |
If no eligible online agent is available, the conversation stays in the Unassigned queue for anyone to claim — auto-routing never blocks a handoff.
Max conversations per agent
When you pick any strategy other than Manual claim, a Max conversations per agent field appears (default 5). Auto-routing will not push an agent past this many active conversations, so busy agents stop receiving new work until they resolve some.
🎬 [Video] — Switching from Manual claim to Load-balanced and watching a new escalation auto-assign.
How skill-based routing works
Skill-based routing relies on two things:
- The skills catalog — the list of skill tags you define in the Agent Skills card on the Escalation settings page (for example ,text
billing,textreturns).textspanish - Per-agent skills — each teammate is tagged with the skills they have. You assign these per agent under Team & roles.
When a conversation is escalated, the AI suggests the skills it thinks the issue needs (shown as chips on the inbox card). Skill-based routing then looks for an online agent whose skills cover those tags. If several qualify, the least-busy one wins; if none match, it routes load-balanced instead.
Removing a skill from the catalog automatically removes it from every agent, so keep the catalog tidy.