Team inboxes where round robin is enabled continuously assign new conversations to active teammates in a sequential order. It doesn’t account for the teammate’s assignment limit. When a teammate’s status changes to 'Away,' they are excluded from the assignment pool until they return to 'Active.' Each team inbox maintains its own rotation, skipping inactive teammates and continuing where it left off, ensuring a consistent sequential assignment process.
Tip: We recommend round robin for Sales teams to ensure new leads are distributed evenly across teammates. For Support teams, we recommend using balanced assignment.
Note: Managing these settings requires the "can manage round robin assignment" permission.
Get started with round robin assignment
Go to Settings > Inbox > Team inboxes and click on a team inbox name, then select “Round robin”.
Note: Round robin works on open conversations which are auto assigned to a new inbox. As long as that inbox also has round robin on it, it will auto assign to a new teammate.
It's not possible to customize the round robin rotation at this time. Conversations are assigned to one of the next valid assignees. Round-robin works for conversations routed via workflows as long as they are unassigned upon arrival. Manually moved conversations do not trigger round-robin, ensuring workflows are essential for automation.
You could choose to remove yourself or your teammates from the rotation by toggling on "away mode" to not be assigned new conversations. Turning away mode off will then re-enter the teammate into the rotation. This ensures teammates are only assigned tasks when available, maintaining workflow efficiency. If teammates frequently switch statuses, rotation might become uneven. To ensure fairness, monitor activity logs and teammate availability to troubleshoot distribution issues.
Important:
Round robin doesn’t account for the teammates’ assignment limit. Only balanced assignment does.
Conversations only get assigned to a teammate once when they arrive in a team inbox. If the teammate is unassigned, round robin won’t run again to find another teammate.
Conversations assigned to a round robin team inbox while all teammates are away won’t automatically get assigned to teammates when they become active.
When a conversation is assigned to a team inbox via a macro, and round robin is enabled for that inbox, round robin assignment will occur and the conversation will be assigned to an active teammate. This applies to both new and existing conversations moved by macro actions.
Away mode
By default, round robin excludes teammates in Away mode from the assignment rotation. Teams that prefer away teammates to still receive conversations — so their queue is ready when they return — can change this behavior per team.
When a team uses round robin as its distribution method, an Ignore activity status section appears below this assignment method. This allows you to toggle "Assign conversations to teammates even if they're away or away & reassigning replies."
Default: Off — away teammates are excluded from round robin, matching existing behavior
When enabled: Away teammates remain in the rotation and can be assigned conversations even while in Away mode
Note: This toggle is only visible on teams configured for round robin assignment. It does not appear for balanced assignment or other distribution methods. The setting is configured per team, there is no workspace-wide default.
Reassignment behavior
When the toggle is enabled, conversations assigned to an away teammate on that team will not be automatically reassigned away from them. The away mode reassignment logic respects this per-team setting.
Important: Conversations manually assigned to a team inbox (i.e., not using Workflows) won’t automatically get assigned to active teammates via round robin. For automated distribution, ensure conversations are routed to the team inbox via a Workflow. Conversations that have Workflow automations configured will automatically follow the Round Robin logic. If no relevant Workflow is set up, conversations may remain unassigned until manually assigned.
What’s next?
Need more help? Get support from our Community Forum
Find answers and get help from Intercom Support and Community Experts