Routing & skills
Requires the Escalation module.
Routing decides how an escalated conversation reaches an agent. Pick a strategy under Dashboard → Settings → Escalation → Routing Strategy.
🖼️ [Image] — The four routing strategy options with the "Max conversations per agent" field below.
The four strategies
| Strategy | How it assigns |
|---|---|
| Manual claim (default) | No auto-assignment. Conversations land in Unassigned and agents pick them up from the Inbox. |
| Round-robin | Rotates across eligible agents — the one who has gone longest without a claim gets the next conversation. Someone who has never claimed anything is first in line. |
| Load-balanced | Assigns to the agent with the fewest active conversations right now. |
| Skill-based | Matches the skills the AI suggested for the conversation against agents who hold those skills, then picks the least busy match. Falls back to load-balanced when nothing matches. |
Ties are broken deterministically, so two conversations escalating in the same second never both land on the same agent by accident.
Who is eligible for auto-assignment
An agent must satisfy all of these to receive an auto-assigned conversation:
- Role — Agent, Admin, or Owner. Viewers are never assigned work.
- Active member — not deactivated or removed from the workspace.
- Online — their presence is Online. Away, Busy, and Offline agents are skipped, including anyone moved to Away automatically after a spell of inactivity. See Agent presence & audit log.
- Under capacity — fewer active conversations than Max conversations per agent.
If nobody qualifies, the conversation simply stays in the Unassigned queue for anyone to claim. Auto-routing never blocks or delays a handoff — it is an optimisation on top of the queue, not a gate in front of it.
Max conversations per agent
Choose any strategy other than Manual claim and a Max conversations per agent field appears, defaulting to 5. Auto-routing will not push an agent past that many claimed conversations, so a busy agent stops receiving new work until they resolve some. Agents can still manually claim beyond the cap — the limit governs what the system pushes at them, not what they choose to take.
🎬 [Video] — Switching from Manual claim to Load-balanced and watching a new escalation auto-assign.
How skill-based routing works
Skill-based routing needs three pieces in place:
- A skills catalog. Define your skill tags in the Agent Skills card on the Escalation settings page — for example
billing,returns,spanish. Changes there save immediately. - Skills on your agents. Tag each teammate with the skills they actually handle, from the member row in Team & roles. An agent with no skills can still be routed to — just never because of a skill.
- A suggested skill on the conversation. When a conversation is escalated, the AI infers which skills the issue needs and attaches them. You can see them as chips on the inbox card.
The match is case-insensitive and needs only one skill in common. Among the agents who match, the least busy wins. If the AI suggested nothing, or no online agent covers the suggestion, routing quietly falls back to load-balanced across everyone eligible.
Removing a skill from the catalog strips it from every agent who held it, so keep the catalog small and meaningful. Three to six broad skills route better than twenty narrow ones — narrow tags mean more fallbacks, and a fallback is just load-balancing.
Choosing a strategy
- One or two agents — Manual claim. Routing machinery adds nothing when everyone sees everything.
- A shift-based team with interchangeable agents — Round-robin for even workload distribution, or Load-balanced if conversation lengths vary a lot.
- Specialists (a billing person, a Spanish speaker, a technical tier) — Skill-based, with a short catalog.
You can change the strategy at any time; it applies to the next escalation, not retroactively.