Making sure conversations are assigned to the right teammate or staff agent is crucial for not losing track of customer requests. Unassigned conversations can easily slip through the cracks and affect your brand and support performance. Conversations that have been assigned will also send notifications to the assignee.
You can assign and reassign conversations to different staff members or departments on the fly. There are no requirements as to who can be assigned to which conversation.
An assignee is the agent or teammate in charge of a particular conversation thread. When new customer messages arrive, agents signed up for notifications for that particular channel will be notified. By default, the first agent to reply to the customer message will become the "Assignee" of that conversation thread. All subsequent communication will go through that agent alone. The conversation thread will no longer be under the "Unassigned" status and other agents will no longer receive notifications for future messages under that thread.
A conversation thread can be "Reassigned" to another agent. Simply open a conversation thread and click on the "Reassign" button on the navigation menu, select the new agent from the drop-down menu, and click "Assign". This action will change the "Assignee" to the new agent. All notifications will go to the new agent. For all "Unassigned" conversations in a particular channel, all agents signed up to receive notifications will continue to receive notifications until the message is assigned.
You can choose to use the "Reply and leave unassigned" reply option to keep the message as unassigned if your workflow calls for that.
The dashboard also has bulk assign and reassign capabilities. Simply select the conversations you want to interact with (for selecting conversatiions more quickly, use Shift+Click) and click the "Reassign" button.
Assigning conversations can also be done via workflows. Simply select the "Assign" command from the dropdown menu and select a staff to assign the triggered conversation to.