Chat Assignment options

The chat assignment section allows you to decide whether you want to assign conversations automatically to your operators or allow operators to assign themselves to selected conversations manually. 

 

In this article, you'll learn:

• What the benefits of using automatic chat assignment are
• How manual chat assignment works 
• How automatic (Round Robin) chat assignment works 

 

 

The benefits of using automatic chat assignment 

 

Equal chat distribution

The chats are equally distributed among the active operators, so your operators don't need to worry about who should pick up the conversation. 

 

Faster reply time 

Automatic assignment can increase your operator's efficiency and shorten the time of the first response, as messages from new customers will be assigned directly to the operators.

 

 

How it works

 

You can see chat assignment options in the Settings > Workflow > Chat assignment section:

 

 

Once inside, you can choose between two methods of assigning the conversations to your operators: Manual or Round Robin (automatic):

 

 

 

Manual 

 

All new conversations land in the Unassigned folder. The operators can manually pick and assign themselves to the conversations. This is the default option.

 

Round Robin (automatic chat assignment) 

 

When Round-Robin is enabled, new conversations will be automatically assigned to available operators. Operaators who are currently offline will not be assigned any chats this way, however.

Example

 

There are three operators in the Tidio project. The Round Robin algorithm distributes the chats in an orderly manner, so if all of the operators are online, the chat will be distributed in the following way:

 

A new chat arrives - Operator 1 gets the chat;

A new chat arrives - Operator 2 gets the chat;

A new chat arrives - Operator 3 gets the chat, and the queue is completed.

A new chat arrives - Operator 1 gets the chat;

A new chat arrives - Operator 2 gets the chat;

... and so on.

 

 

The queue continues this way. If an operator is offline, their turn is skipped. 

 

Please remember that Round-Robin only applies to direct messages from Live Chat, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Emails will continue to land in the Unassigned folder, as they don't require as immediate attention as the other incoming types of communication, and the same applies to tickets from your Helpdesk.

 

The Round Robin mechanism will work only for the conversations that arrived in your inbox after enabling the feature. That means the conversations before Round Robin was enabled will not be impacted.  

 

If the Departments feature is used, each department will have its own assignment queue. If an operator is assigned to several different departments, they will get conversations from all their departments separately.