If you want to make sure a conversation gets answered by the right person in your company, you should assign it to a particular teammate and team. There are three different ways to do that in Intercom:

When you need to pass a conversation to someone else you can quickly assign the conversation to the best teammate or team who can answer it. For example, you can pass a particularly technical question to a support engineer or you could send a pricing question to the sales team:

When you manually assign a conversation to a specific teammate, the team assignment also remains in place. This means if that teammate switches on away mode, the conversation will be automatically assigned back to the correct team.

Assigning a conversation to a team will remove the teammate assignment, so it can be picked up from that team’s inbox at the right time, or assigned automatically by round robin, or workload management.

Conversations can be assigned automatically by Inbox rules. To create a rule go to Settings > Inbox Settings > Inbox Rules, and click "New rule":

Tip: Rules can also automatically tag conversations, mark them as priority, or set conversation attributes & SLA rules.

You can use these rules to assign conversations to a team or teammate based on the content of the messages, conversation attributes, how long a customer has been waiting and/or any information about the lead, user or company that you track in Intercom. This means you no longer need to manually assign incoming messages, and your customers will get the best response faster.

For more information about creating rules, check out this article.

If a conversation doesn’t match any of your rules, it will be assigned to your default assignee, which you can select at the bottom of the rules list:

If lowest priority is set to 'nobody', it will go to your 'unassigned' inbox.

You can control who can reassign conversations that are already assigned to teammates. This ensures your sales and support teams don't lose conversations that they're working on in their own inbox.

Just go to Teammate settings, click ‘Edit’ on a teammate, and uncheck 'Can reassign conversations and edit lead or user ownership':

Note: This permission only prevents reassigning from a teammate's inbox. Teammates will still be able to assign conversations from team inboxes and the 'Unassigned' inbox.

Tip: Make it easier to manage your teammates permissions with Custom roles.