Customer expectations from support teams are on the rise. They expect a response within minutes if not seconds. The magnitude of the challenge increases with the number of conversations your team receives. How can you ensure that the most critical conversation is assigned to the most available and relevant teammate as quickly as possible? This is when workload management comes into play.
Workload management in action
Let’s start with a simplified version of how conversations flow through Intercom.
Conversations coming from the Intercom Messenger, your support email, or social channels, pass by your Workflows that assign them to the appropriate team inbox. Conversations waiting in a team inbox are then assigned to teammates who belong to it.
This article focuses on the last step in the diagram above: assigning the most critical conversations from the various team inboxes to the most available and relevant teammate as quickly as possible.
Assignment methods for workload management
Balanced assignment: We recommend balanced assignment to support teams. It ensures teammates workload is evenly distributed and that the most critical conversations are addressed first. Conversations are assigned to the active teammate with the fewest open conversations. Teammates with open conversations equal or above their assignment limit don’t receive more conversations. You can control the order in which conversations are assigned to teammates. Read a balanced assignment deep dive here.
Round robin: This is suitable for sales teams to ensure new leads are distributed evenly across teammates. Conversations are assigned to active teammates in a sequential order. Round robin doesn’t account for teammates assignment limit. Read a round robin deep dive here.
Manual assignment: We recommend manual assignment only when it is not a critical team inbox and you don’t want it to distract your teammates. Conversations will not be automatically assigned to individual teammates (unless they match one of your assignment rules). This is the default setting for new team inboxes.
Note:
Conversation volume control is currently not available in our mobile SDKs.
The different assignment methods are available on specific plans. See our plans and pricing here.
For workspaces without the Workload Management feature, the default assignment limit will be 3 and not modifiable.
Changing the assignment method of different team inboxes
Navigate to Settings > Inbox > Team inboxes.
Next, click on a team inbox name to expand its configurations and select the needed assignment method.
Wrap-up time
Wrap-up time gives chat and email teammates a moment to finish notes after closing or reassigning a conversation, before they receive the next one. When a teammate closes or reassigns a conversation, that freed-up assignment slot stays reserved for the configured duration so they can complete any post-conversation tasks without interruption.
During wrap-up time:
Teammates stay Available: their status doesn't flip to Away.
Their other live conversations continue receiving new work as normal, only the one closed/reassigned slot is held.
A banner in the Inbox shows "Wrapping up N conversations" with a countdown timer.
A Get another conversation button lets them end the wait early.
How to configure wrap-up time
Wrap-up time is off by default. You can enable this per channel:
Toggle it on for Chat and/or Email under "Wrap-up time".
Set the duration for each channel (up to 2 hours).
Note: Chat and email wrap-up time is separate from phone wrap-up time. Phone wrap-up is configured in Settings > Channels > Phone and sets the teammate's status to Away during the wrap-up period. Chat and email wrap-up keeps teammates Available throughout.
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