Assignment

Every conversation can have one assignee: the teammate responsible for it. Assignment is about who answers; it doesn’t stop anyone else on the team from replying. Conversations without an assignee sit under Unassigned in the inbox.

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Assign by hand

Any teammate can assign any conversation, to anyone on the team or to nobody.

• In a conversation: use the Assignee menu in the header. It lists Unassigned and every teammate, with you marked (me).
• From the keyboard: press a to assign the open conversation (or the highlighted row) to yourself.
• From the command palette (Ctrl K with a conversation open): Assign to me, Assign to teammate… or Unassign.

When you assign a conversation to someone else, they get a notification (<your name> assigned you <customer>) if they have A chat is assigned to you turned on. Assigning yourself never notifies you.

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Round robin

With round robin on, the desk gives each conversation that starts needing a person to the next teammate who has the desk open.

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Turn it on

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When it assigns

Round robin runs at the moment a conversation starts needing a person:

• The AI hands off. For any reason: the AI decides it can’t help, the customer presses Talk to a person, a website action the site marked for a person, the AI’s reply limit, the monthly AI cap, or an AI error. See Handoff.
• A new chat arrives while AI replies are off. It goes straight to the team.

It doesn’t run when:

• a teammate takes over from the AI (by replying or with Take over),
• a conversation already has an assignee,
• the chat began with a teammate’s invite from the Visitors page (it belongs to that teammate),
• the conversation isn’t open, or the AI is still handling it.

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Who it picks

The desk looks only at teammates who are online (see Presence) and still members of the workspace. Of those under the limit, it picks the one who has waited longest since their last round-robin assignment. A tie goes to the teammate with fewer open conversations. The open-conversation count includes chats assigned by hand. When it assigns a conversation, the thread gets an internal note: Assigned to <name> automatically (round robin). The teammate gets a New chat assigned to you notification if they want either A chat is assigned to you or A chat needs a person. If nobody is online, or everyone is at the limit, the conversation stays in Unassigned and every teammate who wants A chat needs a person is notified. The choice is also in desk.yaml as inbox.assignment (mode, capacity); saving here updates the file. See desk.yaml.

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Presence

A teammate counts as online while they have the desk open in a browser tab. The desk keeps a live connection per tab and pings it every 30 seconds; a tab that hasn’t answered for 75 seconds counts as gone, so a laptop that went to sleep or a closed tab doesn’t keep someone online. You see who’s online in the account menu at the bottom of the sidebar: your name shows <workspace> · N online, and the menu lists everyone under Online now. Presence drives two things:

• Round robin picks only from online teammates.
• The widget’s email ask. When nobody is online, the widget offers the visitor Get the reply by email? right away instead of after a minute. See the inbox.

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Next steps