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.
Note: Balanced assignment is only available on the Expert plan.
In this article we'll cover:
How balanced assignment decides which teammate to assign a conversation to.
How to define your teammates assignment limit to ensure they are not overloaded and can send high quality replies.
How to set your conversations prioritization logic to ensure that the most critical conversations are assigned to teammates first.
To get started, navigate to your workspace Settings > Inbox > Teams and click on team inboxes to modify their assignment method:
Matching conversations with teammates
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:
They are member of the team inbox in question.
Their status is set to active.
Their open conversations are less than the teammates’ assignment limit.
Their open conversations are less than the specific inbox assignment limit (if configured).
How limits interact
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.
Tip: You can learn more about configuring these settings in the Inbox assignment limits article.
In the assignment UI, you will now see limits displayed as Inbox capacity / Teammate capacity.
The first number shows the total assignments against the inbox limit.
The second number shows the total assignments against the teammate’s overall 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.
Note: If capacity is set to 3 and 'Teammate A' has 3 conversations and 'Teammate B' has 1, 'Teammate B' will get 2 conversations before 'Teammate A' gets 1.
Defining primary and secondary team inboxes
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.
If teammate has more than one inbox set as Primary, we will pool all conversations in these inboxes together, when determining which conversation to assign next through balanced assignment. Conversations will be assigned based on the following criteria 👇
Conversations marked as priority will be assigned first.
Next, conversations that are closest to hitting the SLA will be assigned.
Finally, the longest waiting conversation will be assigned.
Defining teammate assignment limits
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.
Note: Assignment limits treat all conversations and tickets the same, regardless of the channel they were created through (Chat, Email, Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, SMS). This means that if the assignment limit is 10, one teammate can get 5 emails and 5 conversations, while another teammate can get 10 conversations.
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":
Note: You'll only have the option to use separate limits if you include tickets for workload management.
Override the workspace limit by defining an assignment limit for individual teammates under the "Teammates" 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.
Inbox assignment limits
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.
Note: Assignment limit doesn’t prevent manually assigning conversations to teammates even if they’re at their limit.
Include/exclude tickets in balanced assignment
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.
You can learn more about Ticket assignment limits here.
Manage teammate limits at scale
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:
Name: Sort teammates alphabetically.
Conversation assignment limit: Sort numerically to see teammates with the highest or lowest chat capacity.
Ticket assignment limit: Sort numerically to manage ticket-specific workload distribution.
Primary team inboxes: Sort by the primary inboxes assigned to each teammate.
Secondary inboxes: Sort by the secondary inboxes assigned to each teammate.
Tags: sorted by tag count.
Tip: Click a column header to toggle between ascending and descending order. Your sorting preferences will be remembered the next time you visit the page.
Bulk update teammate limits
If you need to adjust limits for multiple teammates at once:
Select the checkboxes next to the teammates you wish to edit.
Click the relevant action button at the top of the table, such as Edit assignment limit or Edit ticket assignment limit or Edit primary team inboxes or Edit secondary team inboxes.
Confirm the actions you wish to implement.
Defining conversations prioritization
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:
Conversation priority: Conversations marked as priority are sorted first.
SLA: Conversations are sorted by their SLA breach time. Conversations that have already breached their SLA are sorted before the ones that have yet to breach. Conversations without an SLA are sorted last and rely on the next attribute on your list to sort them against each other.
Waiting since: Conversations where the user has been waiting longest are sorted first. Waiting time is calculated based on the oldest unanswered user reply. Conversations where the last reply is from a teammate (not waiting) are sorted last and rely on the next attribute on your list to sort them against each other.
Started at: Conversations with the oldest first user reply are sorted first.
Team inboxes priority: Conversations are sorted based on their team inboxes’ priority order defined in the workload management page.
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.
“Pull conversation” button
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.
Note:
The “Pull conversation” button doesn’t account for the assignment limit. It assigns conversations even if teammates are at their limit.
The "Pull conversation" button ignores a teammate's Inbox status (Active vs. Away). If a teammate hits the button while in Away mode, it will still assign them a conversation.
Reassign unsnoozed conversations when teammates are at capacity
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.
Reassign unsnoozed conversations when away
Similar to reassigning conversations when teammates are at capacity, you can also configure balanced assignment to reassign unsnoozed conversations when the original assignee is away.
If a conversation is unsnoozed and the assignee is away, the assignee will be unassigned, and another assignee from the team will be selected according to the balanced assignment method.
Two conditions in your workspace need to be met for this feature to work:
Reassign unsnoozed conversations when away is enabled in Settings > Inbox > Assignments > General.
Team inbox is set up with "Balanced" assignment method.
Note: If a teammate unsnoozes a conversation they're assigned to themselves, it will not reassign. It only reassigns when the unsnooze is triggered by response actions from other teammates or automatic unsnooze timers.
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