Configure multiple markets on an Email channel

Historically, an Email channel could be pinned to exactly one market. That single market stamped every conversation the inbox received, no matter what language the customer wrote in. You can still do that — but an Email channel can now be assigned several markets at once, and Atender picks the right one per conversation based on the language it detects in the email.

This is useful when one address genuinely serves more than one country — for example, a single support@yourcompany.com inbox handling both UK and US customers, or a regional inbox covering several neighboring markets in the same language family.

Before you start

• This feature applies to Email channels routed to an Agent Stack. If the channel is routed to a team instead, the Markets field is not shown — team-routed channels do not use market-based knowledge retrieval the same way.
• You need admin access to change channel settings.
• Decide up front what the channel’s Default Language should be. It matters more now than it did with a single market — see How the tiebreak works below.

Assign multiple markets to a channel

1. Go to Settings → Email and open the channel you want to configure.
2. Confirm the channel’s Route is set to an Agent Stack. The Markets control only appears for agent-stack-routed channels; if you see a single Market dropdown instead, the channel is routed to a team and this feature does not apply.
3. Under Markets, open the multi-select and add every market this inbox should serve. You can search by market name and pick as many as apply, up to the configured maximum per channel.
4. If you want a specific market to win when the detected language doesn’t clearly point at one of your selected markets, set (or double-check) the Default Language field for the channel. This is the tiebreak — see below.
5. Save the channel.

From this point on, every inbound conversation on this channel is evaluated against the full list of markets you selected, not a single fixed value.

How Atender picks the market for a conversation

The rule depends on how many markets are configured on the channel:

• One market selected. Nothing changes from the old behavior — that market stamps every conversation on the channel.
• Several markets selected. Atender detects the language of the inbound email and tries to match it to one of the markets you configured for the channel:
• If the detected language maps unambiguously to one of your selected markets, that market stamps the conversation.
• If the detected language is one that could belong to more than one of your selected markets (for example, English across a UK+US inbox), Atender also looks at the region implied by the language (such as en-GB vs en-US) to disambiguate, when that information is available.
• If the language still doesn’t decide — the language wasn’t detected clearly, or maps to none of your selected markets — the channel’s Default Language setting acts as the tiebreak, provided it also resolves to one of your selected markets.
• If neither the detected language nor the default language decides, the conversation isn’t stamped with a market from this step.
• No markets selected. Behavior is unchanged from today’s flag-gated default and is outside the scope of this article.

Knowledge retrieval vs. routing trust

The source that decided the market matters for how much Atender trusts it downstream:

• A market chosen from the detected email language biases knowledge retrieval toward that market’s content, but it is treated as a softer signal — it does not carry the same trust as a channel-level market when routing decisions are made.
• A market chosen because it’s the only market on the channel, or because the Default Language tiebreak resolved it, is treated as a channel-level signal and carries the same trust as the single-market setup you may already be using elsewhere — it’s used for both knowledge retrieval and routing.

In practice: the more markets you add to one inbox, the more conversations will be language-decided rather than channel-decided, and the more it matters that your knowledge base is organized per market rather than relying on routing alone to separate them.

How this differs from single-market channels

If you’ve configured Email channels before, you’re used to the single Market dropdown described in the core email channel documentation — one inbox, one market, always. Multi-market channels are additive on top of that:

• A channel with exactly one market selected in the new Markets control behaves identically to the old single-market setup.
• A channel with several markets selected introduces the language-detection step described above, which single-market channels never needed.
• Multi-market selection is only available where the channel is routed to an Agent Stack. Team-routed channels keep the original single-market experience.

If you’re not sure whether a channel needs multiple markets, start with one — you can always come back and add more later without losing your existing configuration.

Limits and notes

• There’s a cap on how many markets a single channel can carry. If you try to add more than the maximum, the multi-select won’t let you save.
• Removing markets down to zero, or clearing the field entirely, returns the channel to the default language-fallback behavior rather than any specific market.
• Existing channels that already had a single market configured were carried forward automatically — you’ll see that one market pre-selected in the new Markets control the first time you open the channel.

See also

• The Email channel
• What are Agent Stacks?