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Assign conversations to agents or teams

Assign a conversation to an agent, a team, or both. Routing rules typically handle this automatically — manual assignment is for edge cases (escalations, handoffs, specialist consults). Press A to open the assignment picker.

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Assign conversations to agents or teams

Assignment is how Atender knows who’s responsible for a conversation. Most assignment happens automatically via routing rules, but you’ll regularly need to assign manually — when escalating, handing off, or pulling in a specialist.

What “assigned” means

A conversation can be assigned to:

  • Team only — Anyone on the team can pick it up; appears in the team’s queue
  • Agent only — One person owns it; appears in their personal queue
  • Team + agent — Both — agent has primary responsibility, team is the fallback / context
  • Unassigned — In the general queue, no specific owner

Most workflows use Team + Agent: the team gives broad context (Tier 1, Returns, VIP) and the agent gives specific ownership.

How to assign

  • Press A — Conversation focused — opens the assignment picker
  • Click the Assign button in the conversation header — Mouse-friendly equivalent
  • Bulk assign from list — Multiple conversations at once — see Bulk actions
  • Routing rules — Automatic at conversation creation — see Routing rules

The assignment picker shows:

  • Available teams (with current active conversation counts)
  • Available agents (with their availability state — online, away, offline)
  • Quick options like “Assign to me” and “Unassign”

Pick the right level

  • Take ownership of a conversation — Yourself (agent)
  • Hand off to a specialist team — Team
  • Hand off to a specific person — Both team and agent
  • Drop ownership but keep on radar — Just the team
  • Fully unassign — Unassigned

When in doubt, assign to a team rather than an individual. Teams handle absences, vacations, and load-balancing automatically — individual assignments don’t.

Assigning to yourself

If you’re picking up a conversation from a team queue, assign it to yourself. This signals to your teammates “I’ve got this” and prevents two agents from working the same thread simultaneously.

The most common shortcut: open the conversation, press A, type your name (or pick “Assign to me”), confirm.

Reassigning to someone else

When you can’t continue a conversation:

  1. Open the conversation
  2. Press A
  3. Pick the new agent or team
  4. Add an internal note explaining the handoff context (/note or just type with the Note tab selected) — context matters more than the assignment itself

The new assignee gets a notification and the conversation appears in their queue.

Auto-assignment via routing rules

The cleanest assignment is the one you don’t have to do manually. Routing rules classify and assign conversations as they arrive based on:

  • Channel (email vs chat vs voice)
  • Customer field values (VIP, plan tier, language)
  • Tags applied by auto-tag rules
  • Topic detected by AI
  • Time of day / on-call schedules

If you find yourself manually reassigning the same patterns over and over (“French customers should go to the French team”), that’s exactly what routing rules are for. See How to set up a routing rule.

Assignment and presence

Assigning to an offline agent works — the conversation enters their queue and waits. But it can stall if the agent is away for an extended period. Two patterns to handle this:

  • Assign to team + agent — the team can pick it up if the agent doesn’t get back in time
  • Use availability rules — routing rules can be set to skip offline agents automatically

See Agent presence and availability.

Bulk reassignment

When an agent is on PTO or has left:

  1. Filter conversations to “Assigned to [agent]”
  2. Bulk select
  3. Reassign to a teammate or back to the team
  4. Add an internal note if context is needed

See Bulk actions.

See also

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