Routing Strategies & Queues
Every team decides how a new conversation reaches a person: who is offered it, in what order waiting work is served, how long it may wait, and where it goes when the team is closed or full. This guide sets each of those up step by step and shows what happens to real conversations under each choice.
Every plan routes conversations to teams with the Offer assignment mode. The Professional and Enterprise plans add the Auto-Assign and Manual Queue modes, and the routing decisions view.
Before You Start
- Create the team. Open Admin > People & Teams > Teams, click Guided Setup, choose Advanced, enter a name and a ticket prefix, and click Create Team.
- Add members. Click Manage Members on the team’s row, add each user, and close the dialog.
- Send a channel to the team. In your chat widget, web form, or email connection settings, set routing to the team — or route to it from a conversation flow’s route step. See Chat Widget and Conversation Flows.
All settings below are on the team’s edit dialog: click Edit Team on the row, change the tab named in each step, and click Save Changes.
Who Can Be Offered a Conversation
Whatever strategy you pick, a user is only considered when they:
- are a member of the team;
- are in an Available status;
- are not in a cool-down;
- are below the team’s Max Concurrent Conversations Per User;
- have not just declined or let this same offer expire (see Decline Exclusion Period below).
Step 1: Choose the Assignment Mode
On the Routing tab, set Assignment Mode:
| Mode | What happens to a new conversation |
|---|---|
| Offer | The chosen user (or users, with Broadcast) see an offer and must accept it. If it is not accepted in time, the next pick is offered. |
| Auto-Assign | The conversation is assigned straight to the chosen user, with no accept step. |
| Manual Queue | Nothing is pushed. Tickets collect in a backlog and users pull work themselves; the User Selection Strategy field is hidden. |
Step 2: Choose Who Is Offered Each Conversation
On the same tab, set User Selection Strategy. New teams start on Broadcast.
| Strategy | Who gets the conversation | What you will see with real conversations |
|---|---|---|
| Broadcast | Every eligible member at once; the first to accept wins. | All available users see the offer together. Fastest pickup, but everyone is interrupted. |
| Round Robin | One user: the next in the team’s rotation, skipping anyone not eligible. | With two users, chat 1 goes to one, chat 2 to the other, chat 3 back to the first. Only one user is offered each chat. |
| Fewest Active | One user: whoever has the fewest active conversations. | Chats 1 and 2 go to different users. When one of them closes theirs, chat 3 goes to that user. |
| Longest Idle | One user: whoever has been in their current status longest. | Idle time is measured from the user’s last status change, and accepting a chat does not reset it — so the same user can receive several chats in a row until they change status or reach their limit. |
| Skill Match | One user: the best match for the skills the conversation needs. | With no skills required it behaves like Broadcast. If nobody available holds a mandatory skill, the conversation waits in the queue. See Skill-Based Routing. |
Offer settings (Offer mode only)
- Offer Timeout (seconds) — 5 to 300, default 30. How long a user has to accept.
- Max Offer Attempts — 1 to 10, default 3. How many times an offer is re-sent before escalation.
- Decline Exclusion Period (seconds) — 0 to 3600, default 300. How long someone who declined is left out of re-offers of that conversation.
- Missed offers — optionally turn on Take members who miss offers out of routing and set Missed offers in a row (1 to 5).
Capacity and wrap-up
- Max Concurrent Conversations Per User — 1 to 50, default 5. A user at the limit is skipped by every strategy.
- Wrap-up time (seconds) — 0 to 3600. A pause after each conversation before the user is offered the next.
- Disconnected visitor wait (minutes) — 1 to 60, default 5. How long a chat waits for a visitor who dropped off.
Step 3: Set Up the Queue
When nobody eligible is free, the conversation waits in the team’s queue. On the Routing tab, Ticket Selection Strategy decides what is served next when someone frees up:
- First In, First Out — oldest first.
- Priority FIFO — Urgent, then High, Normal, Low; oldest first within each.
- SLA Breach — closest to breaching its SLA first.
- Round Robin Contacts — spreads service across customers so one customer cannot fill the queue.
- Manual order — the team’s drag order in the backlog; unranked tickets last, oldest first.
On the Queue tab, under Queue Management:
- Schedule (business hours) — pick a schedule from Admin > Channels > Schedules, or leave 24/7 (no schedule). Needed for after-hours redirects.
- Queue Limit — how many contacts may wait before overflow routing triggers. Leave empty for unlimited.
- Show queue position to contacts and Show estimated wait time — what a waiting visitor sees in the widget.
- Queue Wait Message — the message shown while waiting.
- Offer Alternative After (seconds) — after this long in the queue, the visitor is offered an alternative. Leave empty to disable.
Step 4: After-Hours and Overflow Redirects
Save the team first; the After-Hours tab then shows Overflow & After-Hours Routing with three rows. For each, choose a Mode — None, Route to Team, Route to Flow, or Route to Bot — and its target.
| Row | When it fires | Without a rule |
|---|---|---|
| After-Hours Routing | A conversation arrives while the team’s schedule is closed. Checked first. | The conversation is routed on the team as usual. |
| Queue Overflow Routing | A conversation arrives while at least Queue Limit contacts are already waiting. | It joins the queue as usual. |
| Queue Alternative Routing | A waiting visitor accepts the alternative offered after Offer Alternative After (seconds) on the Queue tab. | No alternative is offered. |
- Route to Team moves the ticket to the target team: it takes that team’s ticket prefix and that team’s own routing (including its own redirects, up to three hops, never in a loop).
- Route to Flow and Route to Bot apply to chat conversations only; tickets from other channels stay on the team.
- Each redirect is recorded on the conversation’s timeline, for example “Routed by the team’s after-hours rule”.
Example: a day team with a night team behind it
- Create a schedule for the day team’s hours in Admin > Channels > Schedules.
- On the day team’s Queue tab, set Schedule (business hours) to it and Queue Limit to, say, 5.
- On its After-Hours tab, set both After-Hours Routing and Queue Overflow Routing to Route to Team → the night team. Click Save Changes.
What happens next: a chat that arrives after hours is offered only to the night team, and its ticket number carries the night team’s prefix. During the day, the first five waiting visitors see their queue position; the sixth is sent to the night team instead of joining a long queue.
Seeing Why a Conversation Went Where It Did
Open Workspace > Routing Decisions (Professional and Enterprise, with the routing_decisions:view permission). Each row is one decision, with Occurred At, Strategy, Outcome (for example Offered, Assigned, Queued, or Queued: every member at capacity), Users Considered, Users Excluded, and Decision Time. Expand a row to see the Selected User, the Exclusion Reasons for everyone left out, and the Decision Factors. Filter by Outcome and Date range.
Troubleshooting
- Everyone is offered every chat. The strategy is Broadcast, or Skill Match with no skills required.
- A user is never offered anything. Check they are a member, Available, not in a cool-down, and below their concurrent limit; the routing decision’s exclusion reasons say which.
- After-hours chats still reach the day team. The team has no schedule on its Queue tab, or no After-Hours Routing rule.
- Overflow never fires. Queue Limit is empty, or no Queue Overflow Routing rule is set.
Related Documentation
- Team Management — teams, members, statuses, and prefixes.
- Skill-Based Routing — the Skill Match strategy end to end.
- Agent Cool-Down — short breaks that pause new offers.
- Business Hours — building the schedules after-hours routing uses.
- Supervisor Dashboard — live queues and user capacity.