Balanced assignment is our recommended assignment method for support teams. It provides you with the controls you need to automatically route conversations to the most available and relevant teammate as quickly as possible so you can meet your customers' expectations at scale.

In this article we'll cover:

To get started, navigate to your workspace Settings > Inbox > Team inboxes and click on a team inbox to modify their assignment method:

When balanced assignment is enabled, conversations wait in the team inbox, until an eligible teammate is available to receive more conversations. Eligible teammates meet all of the following criteria:

For a conversation to be assigned, a teammate must satisfy both their individual limit and the team inbox limit. This allows you to manage workload based on complexity—for example, setting a lower limit for a high-priority "VIP Support" inbox compared to a general "Sales" inbox.

In the assignment UI, you will now see limits displayed as Inbox capacity / Teammate capacity.

If either the inbox limit or the teammate’s capacity is breached, the respective number will appear in red to make capacity issues immediately visible.

When there are multiple eligible teammates for the same team inbox, conversations are assigned to the teammate with the fewest open conversations.

When multiple eligible teammates have the same number of open conversations, the teammate who didn’t get assigned a conversation for the longest time receives a conversation first.

When a conversation on a balanced-assignment team is waiting in the team inbox without a teammate assigned, an information icon appears next to the Unassigned state in the Inbox. Hover over or expand it to see the reason — for example, "All teammates are at their conversation capacity" or "No eligible teammates".

Expanding the icon shows:

The reason clears automatically once the conversation is assigned to a teammate.

Skill-based routing is covered in its own article. See Skill-based routing to learn how to set it up and how the routing logic works.

You can define teammates membership in team inboxes from Settings > Inbox > Assignments > Teammate assignment limit.

For each teammate you can define their primary and secondary team inboxes. When all primary team inboxes are empty, the teammate starts receiving conversations from their secondary team inboxes.

For example, Bob is a teammate who speaks Italian and English. Bob’s primary focus is Italian team inboxes. Sometimes the flow of conversations in Italian team inboxes isn’t high. When this happens, Bob can start supporting the English team inboxes.

When balanced assignment is enabled, conversations and tickets are automatically assigned to teammates up to their assignment limits. Teammates with open conversations equal to or above their assignment limit don’t receive more conversations.

Control if you want to include or exclude tickets in balanced assignment. You'll find a toggle in the Settings > Inbox > Assignments > Workload management page under the "Auto-assign and assignment limits" section.

This allows you to include or exclude tickets from assignment for teams using balanced assignment.

In Settings > Inbox > Assignments > Workload management, under the "Auto-assign and assignment limits" section, you can define a workspace level assignment limit that applies to all teammates.

You can also set separate limits for conversations and tickets by using the toggle "Use separate limits for conversations and tickets".

Override the workspace limit by defining an assignment limit for individual teammates under the Teammate assignment limit tab. This helps ensure each teammate’s workload matches their skills, seniority, and complexity of conversations they work on.

For example, if you’re onboarding new teammates, we encourage you to give them a relatively lower limit during their first few weeks.

Teammates have different capacities across channels — a teammate handling live Messenger conversations can't always take on the same number of email threads at once. You can set separate assignment limits for email and Messenger chats, giving you fine-grained control over how conversations are distributed.

Enable this in Settings > Inbox > Assignments > Workload management by turning on the "Use separate limits for email and messenger" toggle. When the toggle is off, the total assignment limit applies as before.

Email limit and Messenger limit fields let you set workspace-wide defaults that apply to all teammates who don't have individual channel limits set.

In the Teammate assignment limit tab, two columns — Email and Messenger — let you set per-teammate overrides inline for each channel.

Limit values:

You can also set limits for specific team inboxes in Settings > Inbox > Team inboxes. This works alongside individual limits to prevent overload from specific high-volume or high-complexity inboxes.

A teammate can have up to three layers of limits: a total assignment limit, optional channel limits (Messenger and Email), and inbox assignment limits on specific team inboxes. Balanced assignment only assigns a conversation when the teammate has room under every limit that applies to it. The most restrictive limit always wins.

Channel limits don't need to add up to the total. Each channel limit is an independent cap that sits inside the total. For example:

Channel limits are only available for Messenger and Email. Conversations from other channels, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and SMS, have no channel limit of their own, but they do count toward the teammate's total. If these conversations fill up the total, the teammate stops receiving Messenger and email conversations too, even though their Messenger and Email limits still show room.

For example: a teammate has a total of 10 and a Messenger limit of 5. They're handling 8 WhatsApp conversations and 2 Messenger conversations. They won't get any more Messenger conversations, because they're at their total of 10, even though they're only at 2 of 5 for Messenger.

A teammate's total and channel limits apply across the whole workspace, not per team inbox. Their open conversations in every inbox, and their tickets if you include tickets in workload management, count toward the same limits. A teammate can look like they have room in the inbox you're viewing, while already being at a limit because of conversations held elsewhere.

That's why the assignment view shows two numbers, Inbox capacity / Teammate capacity: the first is what's assigned from this inbox, and the second is the teammate's overall total across the workspace. Check the second number to see whether the teammate can take more.

An inbox assignment limit is checked separately, on top of the teammate's total and channel limits. To assign a conversation from that inbox, the teammate needs room under the inbox limit and under their own limits.

For example: to cap how many conversations a teammate takes from one busy inbox, set an inbox assignment limit of 5 and give the teammate a higher total, such as 15. They take up to 5 from that inbox, while still having room for conversations from other inboxes and channels.

To manage your team's capacity, navigate to Settings › Helpdesk › Assignments › Teammate assignment limit.

The teammate assignment limit view allows you to filter, bulk update, and export data. To identify workload distribution patterns or outliers, you can now sort the table by clicking any of these column headers:

You can filter the Assignment Limits table by teammate availability to instantly narrow down who's active, away, or away and reassigning, without scrolling through your entire team list.

Go to Settings > Inbox > Assignment > Teammate assignment limit and use the Status filter at the top of the table to select one of the following options:

The status filter works alongside the existing name search, sort controls, and the Clear all filters button. If a filter returns no matches, an empty state is shown. Pagination resets to the beginning whenever the filter changes.

If you need to adjust limits for multiple teammates at once:

Imagine a teammate becomes available, they have the capacity to handle one conversation. This teammate belongs to multiple team inboxes where there are several conversations waiting to be assigned. You need to ensure that the most critical and time sensitive conversation gets assigned to them.

From Settings > Inbox > Assignments > Workload management in the "Conversation sorting" section you can define how conversations are prioritized before Intercom assigns the top one to available teammates. You can add or remove attributes. And reorder attributes to change their precedence.

You can rely on one or many of the following attributes:

Using the conversation sorting shown in the screenshot above (Priority, SLA, then Waiting since), here’s an example:

Conversations 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all marked as priority. Conversation 3 is assigned first because it breached its SLA furthest in the past. Then, conversation 5 is assigned as it is the closest to breach its SLA. Both conversation 2 and 4 don’t have an SLA, but conversation 4 is assigned first as it has been waiting for longer. Conversation 1 is assigned last because it is not marked as priority.

When enabled in your workspace, teammates see a button in your inbox that they can use when they're ready to get assigned an additional conversation. Intercom assigns the top conversation across all balanced assignment team inboxes the teammate is member of. It sorts conversations according to the prioritization attributes defined on the workspace level.

This option is useful when you want to provide your teammates with ownership over when they get assigned a conversation, but you still want to leverage the automatic prioritization and avoid cherry picking.

You can enable this button directly from Settings > Inbox > Assignments > Workload management in the "Pull conversation button" section.

When a snoozed conversation reopens, it can end up staying with the original assignee even if they’re already at their assignment limit. For teams using balanced assignment this can unintentionally overload teammates.

Go to Settings > Inbox > Assignments > General and turn on Reassign unsnoozed conversations when teammates are at capacity. Enabling this option returns reopened conversations to the team inbox when the original assignee is at capacity, so balanced assignment can redistribute them fairly.

Unsnoozed reassignment lets you override the workspace's at-capacity setting for individual teammates. Use it when some teammates should keep their unsnoozed conversations (for example, teammates working long-running investigations or tickets waiting on another team), while others should hand them back to the team inbox so someone available can pick them up.

To set unsnoozed reassignment for a teammate, you need the Manage workload management permission:

Each teammate can have one of these unsnoozed reassignment values:

A teammate's unsnoozed reassignment value always takes priority over the workspace setting, in both directions. Teammates set to Follows workspace setting change automatically whenever the workspace setting changes.

For example: your workspace setting is on, but a senior teammate handles long-running escalations. Set that teammate to To current assignee, and their unsnoozed conversations stay with them when they're at capacity, while everyone else's go back to the team inbox.

You can set unsnoozed reassignment for many teammates at once from the Teammate assignment tab:

There's a limit on how many teammates you can bulk edit at once. If you select more than the limit, Edit unsnoozed reassignment is disabled and a tooltip asks you to select fewer teammates. Every unsnoozed reassignment change, single or bulk, is recorded in your workspace activity log.

When a conversation unsnoozes and lands back with an away teammate, it can sit untouched until someone manually reroutes it. There are two settings to handle this automatically, both found in Settings > Inbox > Assignment > General settings, and both require the team inbox to use Balanced assignment.

Away & Reassign means a teammate is away and has explicitly turned on the option to have their conversations reassigned to others. It's a stronger signal than simply being Away.

Choose the setting that matches how your team works:

Automatic reassignment settings let you decide what gets reassigned when a teammate is away or at capacity, and what triggers the reassignment. Set this up on the Reassignment card in Settings > Inbox > Assignments.

On the Reassignment card, you can choose: