Round-robin assignment

By default new conversations land unassigned — they show up in the Unassigned filter and whoever replies first claims them. Round-robin changes that: each new conversation is automatically assigned to the agent with the fewest open chats.

Turning it on

Settings → Chat → Assignment mode → Round robin, then save.

A second field appears: Agent pool. Tick the agents who should receive auto-assignments. People you leave unchecked still see the inbox and can claim manually, but won't be auto-assigned anything.

How it picks

When a visitor starts a chat:

1. We count each pool agent's open (active or waiting) conversations.
2. The agent with the lowest count gets the new chat.
3. Ties are broken randomly.

That's it — no clever load weighting, no skill-based routing. Simple by design.

Edge cases

• No agents in the pool — new conversations land unassigned, like in manual mode. The setting silently falls back.
• All pool agents are offline — we still assign. The visitor sees the offline / leave-a-message form, and the conversation enters Waiting state attached to that agent. They'll see it when they come back online.
• An agent goes on vacation — uncheck them from the pool while they're away. We re-balance on the next chat; existing assignments stay where they were.

When NOT to use it

Round-robin works for a flat team where everyone handles similar inquiries. If your team has clear specializations (billing person, technical person, account manager), manual claim is better — agents pick up the chats they're best at.

You can mix the two: keep manual mode and use the assignee dropdown to deliberately route specific chats to specific people.