Ticket assignment
Route incoming tickets to the right teammate automatically. Choose manual, balanced, or round-robin assignment, cap each agent's open tickets, and fall back to the next shift when nobody is available.
View as MarkdownAssignment decides who owns each incoming ticket. Set it up once and new tickets — from escalations, email, or the API — land on the right teammate without anyone triaging by hand.
Open the agent's Help desk → Assignment settings. Enable assignment, choose a method, and set the optional limits below.
Assignment methods
| Method | How it picks an assignee |
|---|---|
| Manual | No auto-assignment. Tickets arrive unassigned for your team to claim. |
| Balanced | Routes to the available agent with the fewest open tickets, breaking ties by who was assigned least recently. |
| Round robin | Routes to the available agent who was assigned least recently, spreading tickets evenly over time. |
Use balanced to even out current workload (good when ticket effort varies). Use round robin to rotate fairly regardless of how many are currently open.
Who counts as available
Auto-assignment only considers eligible agents. Eligibility depends on whether you use scheduling:
- Without scheduling — an agent is eligible when their availability status is available. Each teammate can toggle their own status.
- With [scheduling](/docs/help-desk/scheduling) — an agent assigned to a shift is eligible only when that shift is currently on, and they're not on time off.
Limits and fallback
Max open tickets
Set a max tickets cap to stop overloading any single agent. An agent at or above the cap is skipped during auto-assignment until they close something. Leave it at 0 for no limit.
Next-shift fallback
When nobody is on shift right now, next-shift fallback routes the ticket to a scheduled agent anyway (respecting the max-tickets cap) instead of leaving it unassigned. Turn this on so off-hours tickets still land on someone's plate for when they return.
If no agent is eligible and fallback is off (or also finds no one), the ticket is created unassigned. It still appears in the Unassigned view for someone to grab — it's never lost.
How a new ticket flows
- 1Build the candidate poolStart from eligible agents (available, or on-shift if scheduling is on).
- 2Apply the capDrop anyone at or above the max-tickets limit.
- 3Fall back if emptyIf nobody qualifies and next-shift fallback is on, consider scheduled agents instead.
- 4Pick by methodBalanced picks the lightest load; round robin picks the least-recently assigned.
- 5Assign and flagThe chosen agent is set as assignee and the ticket moves to On you. With no candidate, it stays unassigned.