An assignment policy decides how a waiting ticket picks its agent. You write a policy once and attach it to as many queues as you like. Queues without a policy keep using their own routing strategy.

A policy only matters on queues with Auto-assign conversations on. See Queues and routing.

Create a policy

You can see the Assignment tab if you have permission to view routing, and change it with permission to manage routing.

An assignment policy sets the order tickets are offered in and, for Balanced, how many tickets one person takes in a time window.

1. 1Assignment order
2. 2Fair distribution cap

1. Open Inbox, then Settings, then the Assignment tab.

2. Select New policy.

3. Name it ("Name this policy…") and optionally add a short description.

4. Choose the Assignment order and the Order within a priority (both below).

5. Select Save policy.

The drawer ends with an In plain words summary, for example "Waiting tickets go to agents in turn, oldest ticket first within each priority."

Once the policy is saved, use Attach queue on its row in the list to choose the queues that use it. Detach queue removes one.

Assignment order

How the next waiting ticket picks an agent:

Order	What it does
Least active	Goes to whoever is handling the fewest tickets right now.
Round robin	Takes turns, starting with whoever waited longest.
Balanced	Spreads load using each agent's remaining capacity.

Only agents who are online and under their limit are considered. See Your status and notifications and Agents and capacity.

Order within a priority

Among waiting tickets of the same priority, which goes out first:

• Oldest first — the ticket that arrived first.
• Longest waiting first — the ticket that's gone unanswered longest.

Higher priorities are served before lower ones. See Priority.

Fair distribution cap

With Balanced only, you can push an agent down the rotation once they've taken a number of tickets in a window: Tickets per agent within a number of minutes. It's greyed out for the other orders.

Skip tickets older than

Choose Never skip, 1 hour, a number of hours, or a number of days. Auto-assignment then leaves older tickets alone. Assigning by hand still works for them.

Turn a policy off

Switch off Policy is active to pause it. While it's inactive, attached queues fall back to their own routing strategy, and the summary says the policy is paused.

Attach and detach queues

Use Attach queue to pick from the queues not yet attached, and Detach queue to remove one. A confirmation such as "Attached Support." appears under the policy's row. If every queue is already attached, the list says so.

If you delete a policy, its queues fall back to plain round-robin.

Queue hours

At the top of the Assignment tab, Queue hours govern assignment is one organisation-wide setting.

• On: nothing is assigned from a queue outside its business hours. Its tickets are assigned when it opens. The AI agent keeps answering at any hour, and a ticket made outside hours gets the queue's away message.
• Off: queues assign at any hour, whatever their business hours say.

You can see the setting without permission to change it. Business hours themselves are set per queue.

Queues and routingTurn on auto-assign and choose who works a queue.PriorityHow a ticket gets its priority, which orders the line.