Assignment

Assignment rules decide which agent handles an incoming conversation. You can continue to assign conversations by hand, or let TextPeak share them out for you using one of two automatic methods.

This article walks you through choosing a method and setting the options that go with it.

To access the Assignment tab options:

1. In your browser, log in to TextPeak with manager access privileges.
2. In the main TextPeak menu, select the Inbox tab.
3. Click Settings at the bottom of the Inbox sidebar.
4. In the Routing group, click Assignment.

5. Open Teams and select a team from the list on the left.

   

The team list shows each team's current method, so you can see at a glance which teams assign automatically and which do not. The settings on the right always belong to the team you selected.

Choosing an assignment method

Three methods are available. The table below compares them.

Round robin ignores how quickly agents work. It deals conversations out one each, in turn, and starts again at the top of the list.

Balanced looks at the current load instead and gives the next conversation to whoever is carrying the least.

Assigning a conversation by hand

1. Open the conversation.
2. In the Details sidebar, expand Conversation Assignment and click Edit.
3. Select a team from the drop-down, then select an agent.
4. Click Save changes.

Assignment settings

The Assignment settings section fully applies when a team uses Round robin or Balanced. It controls capacity, reassignment, and how snoozed work returns.

Default capacity per agent

Each agent in the team handles up to this many open conversations at once. Once an agent reaches the limit, they receive nothing new until one of their conversations closes.

Snoozed conversations do not count toward capacity. An agent at a capacity of four who snoozes one conversation counts as holding three and can take another.

Reassign when an agent goes offline

Turn this on to return an agent's open conversations to the queue as soon as they go Offline, so nothing sits with somebody who has logged out. The conversations go to another agent who is online.

If nobody in the team is online, they wait in the queue until somebody comes back.

Automatic away mode can trigger this on its own: it sets an agent to Offline after a period of inactivity and reassigns their conversations at the same time. For the timers behind that, see the Agent Presence page.

Keep agents on their conversations

Turn this on to prefer the previous agent when a conversation returns to the queue.

It matters most for work that runs longer than a shift. A conversation that takes three days to resolve goes back to the agent who has the context, rather than starting again with somebody new. It is also the setting to use for a contact center working set hours: when everyone goes offline at 6 p.m. and the conversation is still open at 9 a.m., it returns to the same agent.

Maximum snooze length

Maximum snooze length is a backstop. Even a long snooze wakes by this limit. Set a number and a unit.

Without a cap, a conversation snoozed for a month sits assigned to somebody, invisible, with nobody aware it is waiting. The cap is what stops that.

For the agent side of snoozing, see the Snoozed Conversations page.

When a snoozed conversation wakes

This sets the default for agents snoozing in this team. Choose what happens to a woken conversation:

• Same agent: the conversation waits for the agent who snoozed it.
• Allow reassign: the conversation returns to the queue and goes to whoever is available.

Use Same agent where continuity matters more than speed, and Allow reassign where the reply should not wait.

How conversations are picked up

When several conversations are waiting and none of them is assigned, TextPeak hands out the highest-priority conversation first, then the one that has waited longest for an answer.

The Pick-up order list below the assignment settings lets you drag those criteria into a different order, or move them with the arrows. TextPeak saves the order you set and applies it once ordering ships in a future release. Until then, every team uses priority first, then longest wait.

The entries are as follows:

For how a conversation becomes a priority, see Agent's Guide: Managing Conversations.

Checking it works

1. Set the method and save.
2. Send a test message to the team's sender profile from an unrelated number.
3. Open the conversation and check the Conversation Assignment section in the Details sidebar. It should already name an agent.

If the conversation stays unassigned, check that at least one agent in the team is Online and that none of them is at capacity.