Chat assignment rules
The portfolio rule that decides who new chats go to: the three rule options, the per-agent open-chat limit, and who counts as a candidate.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
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The portfolio rule that decides who new chats go to: the three rule options, the per-agent open-chat limit, and who counts as a candidate.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
The sentence you hear most often in a shared inbox is "I thought you were handling that one." The assignment rule ends that uncertainty at the source: the moment a message lands, the conversation has an owner and nobody has to ask. This guide covers the rule's three options, the per-person limit, and exactly who the system counts as a candidate.
⚠️ Note: Only the portfolio owner and its admins see and change the assignment rules. The rule belongs to the portfolio: the same rule applies in all of its accounts, and you cannot set a different rule per account.
In this article you will find:
Under the section heading sits a one-line description: it says that an incoming chat is assigned to an agent automatically, that nobody is asked, and that you can change it by hand later.
The Rule dropdown offers three options, and the fields below it change with your choice; irrelevant fields are not drawn.
New chats arrive unassigned and wait in the inbox as Unassigned. Whoever wants them takes them. This makes sense in small teams, or where everyone is expected to read every message. No other field appears with this option.
A new chat goes to the person with the fewest open chats at that moment. On a tie, the first person in the team list is chosen. One more field opens below: Max open chats per agent.
This rule balances the workload by itself: whoever answers quickly takes more chats, whoever is swamped takes fewer.
Every new chat is assigned to the single person you pick. A Fixed agent dropdown opens below, listing the portfolio's team members.
Use it where one person handles the messages, or where you want every first contact to pass through the same pair of hands.
⚠️ Note: The Fixed agent dropdown lists every member of the portfolio, without checking whether they can reach a given account. Pick someone without access and the chats in that account stay unassigned. For access, see Limiting access per account.
The Max open chats per agent field appears only with Share evenly. It says how many open chats one person can hold at a time:
The limit stops a single agent from collecting a pile they cannot dig out of. Leaving the twenty-first chat in the pool is usually better than adding it to someone who already has twenty open.
💡 Switching to Always the same person and saving resets this limit. When you go back to even sharing, you have to enter the limit again.
When the rule picks a person, it looks for all five of these conditions:
The clock is read in the account's time zone; if your colleague is in another city, the account's time zone is what counts.
⚠️ Note: Someone in the Viewer role also counts as a candidate, because they can see the inbox — but they cannot write a reply. If you do not want chats going to a read-only person, either change their role or take that account out of their access.
The chat stays unassigned and sits in the inbox where the team can see it. No message is lost and nothing happens to the customer; the conversation simply has no owner. This happens when:
If the selected fixed person is removed from the team, the rule falls back to Do not assign on its own, and the screen shows it that way. This is deliberate: the system must not quietly hand work to someone who no longer exists.
The rule fires only when a new conversation opens. It does not:
So switching the rule on today does not spread out yesterday's unassigned conversations; you have to assign those by hand. The steps for manual assignment are in Assigning a conversation to an agent.
When the rule gives a conversation an owner, that shows up everywhere the team looks:
A cosmetics brand's portfolio holds one Instagram account and one WhatsApp number; three agents work in shifts.
The result: morning messages go only to whoever is on the morning shift, evening messages to the evening person. If one agent builds up 15 open chats, the next message goes to another; if all three are full, the chat waits in the pool where the team can see it.
If the rule is in place and chats are still not being assigned, work through the candidate conditions in order; if it persists, contact our Support team.
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