An unassigned conversation belongs to everybody, which in practice means nobody. Assignment is how a conversation gets exactly one owner.
Two kinds of owner
A conversation can carry an agent, a team, or both. They answer different questions.
| What it says | Where it shows | |
|---|---|---|
| Agent | "this specific person is replying" | the Mine tab, their notifications |
| Team | "this group owns the question" | the team view in the sidebar |
They interact in one way that surprises people. Assigning a team removes an assignee who is not in that team. The conversation has moved to a different group, so the previous owner stops being the owner. If the team has auto-assignment switched on, Lynomia Chat then picks one of its members; if not, the conversation sits unassigned inside the team until someone takes it.
You can only assign an agent who is a member of that channel, or an administrator. Someone outside the channel cannot be given the conversation at all, and nothing is assigned.
Letting Lynomia Chat assign
Each channel has an auto-assignment switch, set by an administrator in the channel's settings. With it on, new conversations are handed out without anyone intervening.
The default behaviour is deliberately plain:
- Only agents whose availability is online are considered. An agent set to busy or offline gets nothing.
- Conversations go out oldest first.
- Agents are picked in turn — round robin.
- An agent receives at most five new conversations from one channel in any five minutes. This stops one person absorbing a burst.
- Conversations with no activity for more than seven days are left alone, so an old backlog does not land on whoever happens to be online today.
- If the conversation already has a team, only that team's members are considered — and only if that team allows auto-assignment.
An administrator can replace these defaults with an assignment policy on a channel: oldest-first or longest-waiting, round robin or balanced across current load, and different fair-distribution numbers. Assignment policies are a paid capability and the screen is hidden unless advanced assignment is enabled for your account. Without it you get the defaults above, which are enough for most teams.
What priority is, and is not
Priority has five values: none, low, medium, high and urgent.
Priority is a marker, not a mechanism. Setting a conversation to urgent does not move it up the auto-assignment queue, does not notify anyone extra, and does not start any clock. What it does:
- you can sort the conversation list by priority, highest or lowest first;
- you can filter and save a folder on it;
- automation rules can read it as a condition and set it as an action;
- a macro can set it.
That makes it genuinely useful — as long as somebody is actually looking at the urgent queue. A priority nobody sorts by is decoration.
Steps
- Open the conversation.
- In the panel beside it, pick an agent, a team, or both.
- Set a priority if this one is not ordinary.
To do several at once, tick the conversations in the list and use the bar that appears: assign an agent, assign a team, change status, snooze, add or remove labels.
A worked example
A customer messages about a damaged delivery. It is not a question you can answer, and it needs a decision today.
- Set priority to high.
- Assign the returns team. Your own assignment is cleared, because you are not in that team.
- Add a private note saying what the customer sent you.
The returns team's view now shows it, sorted above their ordinary work if they sort by priority.
Who can do this
Any agent can assign a conversation they can see — including to themselves — and change its priority. Only an administrator can switch auto-assignment on for a channel, create teams, or create an assignment policy. See roles and permissions and teams and agents.
Limits
- Auto-assignment needs somebody online. If no agent on the channel is online when a conversation arrives, it stays unassigned.
- Without an assignment policy, assignment runs when something happens on the channel — a conversation is created, opened, resolved or snoozed. There is no separate sweep. A conversation that found nobody online waits for the next such event in that channel.
- Balanced distribution is only honoured when advanced assignment is enabled. A policy set to balanced falls back to round robin without it.
- Priority cannot be changed in bulk. The bulk bar covers status, snooze, agent, team and labels only.
- Assigning a bot to a conversation sets it to pending and clears the human assignee. That is a handover, not a shared ownership.
Related
If it does not work
I assigned a team and lost the conversation from my Mine tab. Expected: the team is not one you are in, so your assignment was cleared. Assign yourself again after the team if you want to keep it.
Auto-assignment is on but nothing is being assigned. Check, in order: is at least one agent on that channel set to online; are the waiting conversations older than seven days; has one agent already taken five in the last five minutes; if the conversations have a team, does that team allow auto-assignment.
I cannot find a colleague in the assignee list. They are not a member of that channel. An administrator adds them in the channel's settings.