Every ticket has at most one owner, shown as the Assignee pill in the conversation toolbar. Most tickets are assigned for you by the queue, but you can claim work, hand it over or take it back yourself.

How a ticket gets an owner

• Automatically. If the queue has Auto-assign conversations on, new tickets are offered in turn to agents who are online and under their limit. See Assignment policies.
• By claiming it. Anyone can take a ticket nobody holds.
• By a colleague. Someone transfers it to you, or a macro or automation rule assigns it.

When a ticket is assigned to you, you get a notification, and you automatically follow the conversation.

Take an unassigned conversation

Open a ticket on the Unassigned tab and select Assign to me. If two people select it at once, one wins. The other sees "{name} took this conversation a moment ago" and the ticket shows its new owner.

On an unassigned conversation, Assign to me makes it yours in one click.

1. 1Assign to me

What you see depends on your permissions. Agents who can't route work see the Assign to me button on unassigned tickets. People with the assign permission see the Assignee pill instead, with the same option inside its menu.

Give a conversation to someone else

Select the assignee to take an unassigned conversation, or Transfer it to a teammate or a queue.

Open the Assignee control, choose Transfer, pick a colleague and confirm; the assignee updates at once.

1. Open the conversation and select the Assignee pill in the toolbar.

2. Choose Transfer…. The transfer panel opens.

3. Pick an agent or a queue, add an optional handover note, and select Transfer.

The full panel is described in Transfer and collaborate. You can always transfer a conversation you hold yourself. Moving someone else's conversation needs the assign permission.

Take a conversation over

If a colleague holds the ticket, the pill menu offers Take over instead of Assign to me.

1. Open the conversation. A banner shows who owns it.

2. Select Take over in the banner, or in the Assignee menu.

3. Confirm "Take this conversation from {name}?" by selecting Take over.

Take over always asks for a second click, and it only works on the version of the ticket you were looking at. If someone else got there first, you see "{name} took this conversation a moment ago." (or "Someone else took this conversation a moment ago.") and can choose Take over again. Nothing is overwritten until you do.

Unassign

Open the Assignee menu and select Unassign. The ticket goes back to waiting, and appears under Unassigned.

Things that change the owner on their own

• Resolving a ticket unassigns it. The status menu says so beside Resolved.
• Reopening a resolved ticket gives it back to you if you hold the assign permission. Otherwise it stays unassigned until routing or an admin picks it up.
• Going offline. If you stay offline long enough, your open tickets go back to their queue and are assigned again. The wait is a setting on each queue. Snoozed tickets stay with you. Set your status from the user menu; see Your status and notifications.
• Full agents are skipped. Each agent has a maximum number of active tickets. Someone at that limit isn't offered new work, and a transfer to them may be refused.

Assign many at once

Select several rows with their checkboxes, then use the Assignee button in the bar that appears. See Bulk actions.

See the history

Open the conversation, select More actions (…) in its header and choose Transfer history to see every time it changed hands, who did it, and whether a person, a macro, an automation rule or an SLA escalation moved it.

Transfer and collaborateHand over with a note, follow along and mention colleagues.Queues and routingDecide who is offered a ticket and when.