Overview

Assign conversations to give every message a clear owner and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

You'll typically assign a conversation to the person on your team in charge of replying to that specific inquiry. By assigning all conversations, you can ensure no message goes unreplied. A conversation can only be assigned to one user at a time.

You can:

1. Manually Assign conversation
2. Assign to agent who first replies to a conversation
3. Use Auto Assignment settings
4. Assign via Rules

Manually assign conversations

To manually assign a conversation, open any conversation, and assign it to the right person. (refer screenshot)


You can also select multiple conversations and assign them to the right person.

First to Reply Assignment

By default, Helpwise assigns a conversation to the agent who first replies to any conversation. You can utilize this default setting and instruct your team members to pick up conversations from the "Unassigned" folder directly. This ensures that whoever is available on your team reverts to the customer.
You can turn off this default setting from your Inbox Settings if you do not want your team to function in this manner.

Auto Assignment through Inbox Settings

First, go to your inbox settings and select the right inbox.



Scroll down to find auto assignment and reassignment settings.

Auto Assignment Settings:

1. Round Robin: Say, you have 4 team members you want to assign the conversations to - Anna, Barbara, Cathlyn and David. With this setting, the first new conversation which arrives to your inbox gets assigned to Anna, second to Barbara, third to Cathlyn, and fourth to David. The fifth new conversation will get assigned to Anna again, and so on. This feature is only available for Premium plans and above.
2. Load Balancing: This setting takes into account the current workload of your team members. Say, you have two team members, Anna and Barbara. Anna currently has 4 conversations assigned to her while Barbara has 7. This setting will first assign 3 conversations to Anna, so that both Anna and Barbara have 7 active conversations assigned to them. Once the load has been balanced, it will distribute new conversations equally to Anna and Barbara. This setting is only available on our Advanced Plan.

Note: Assignment settings only work for team members marked as 'Available' (and not for team members who have marked themselves as 'Away'. (Each user can set their availability from the profile icon on top right.)

Reassignment Settings: 
This works together with the auto-assignment settings. Reassignment settings work when there is a new email or message on an existing conversation.

Use case - It is useful in cases where say your team member goes on leave but has certain conversations assigned to them. If a customer on any of those conversations reaches out again while your team member is away, someone else from your team can get back to the customer. This ensures a better experience for your customers.

1. Assign automatically (recommended): If the assigned agent is not available, this setting will automatically reassign the conversation to an available agent
2. Unassign Conversation: If the assigned agent is not available, this will leave the conversation unassigned
3. Ignore Unavailability: This will not take the availability of the assigned agent into account, and keep the conversation assigned to them

Assign conversations via Rules

Rules will supersede your Auto Assignment settings (set via Inbox settings). To set rules, go to Automation > Rules from the top navigation bar. Rules can only be set by Account Owners and Admins.

Assignment Rules take into account the availability of your team members, and will only work for team members marked as 'Available' (and not for team members who have marked themselves as 'Away')

Some example of assignment via rules:

1. Assign conversations basis keyword: In the below example, if the body of the conversation contains the word "refund", a tag called "Refund" gets automatically added and the conversation gets assigned to Aakanksha.
   
   
   
   
2. Assign conversations basis sender: In the below example, if someone from company1.com or company2.com sends an inquiry to any of the two inboxes Helpwise or Helpwise Chat, it will automatically get assigned to Francis and Ena in a round robin manner.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Assign conversations basis time of the day: In the below example, if a new conversation arrives between 10 am to 8 pm it gets assigned to Ena and Francis in round robin. Similarly, you can set up additional rules for conversations arriving at the other times.
   [Note:If you are setting up a rule from PM to AM, e.g. 10 PM to 8 AM, the If condition should be "time is between" 10:00 AM to 11:59 PM OR "time is between" 12:00 AM to 8:00 AM, for it to work properly]
   
   
   
4. Assign conversations basis addition of tag: In the below example, whenever you add a tag called "Discount" on any conversation, it gets assigned to Samreen. Note that this will only apply to new tags which are created post enabling the rule, and not apply to existing conversations with the tag.
   
   
   

Similarly, you can create multiple other assignment rules depending on your use case!