Round robin for email, messaging and calls

Round robin hands work out evenly in turn, which is fair and blind to how difficult each piece is.

Round robin hands work out evenly in turn, which is fair and blind to how difficult each piece is.

Turn it on

1. Open the omnichannel routing settings in Admin Center.
2. Choose round robin as the assignment method.
3. Save.

Available agents receive in turn, across email, messaging and calls.

What it is good at

• Even distribution of count. Nobody gets twice as many tickets as their neighbour.
• No cherry-picking. The easy ones cannot be taken first.
• Simple to explain, which matters when a team is asking why they got something.

What it ignores

Difficulty. Ten straightforward tickets and ten complicated ones are the same to round robin, so two agents with equal counts can have very different afternoons.

Capacity rules soften this by limiting how much someone holds at once, but they count items rather than effort too.

Combine it with capacity

Round robin alone keeps handing work to someone who is drowning, because it is their turn. Capacity rules stop that: the agent at their limit is skipped until they clear something.

The two together are what most teams actually want, and running round robin without capacity is the usual reason someone says routing is unfair.

Skills first, then round robin

Where skills are in use, they narrow who is eligible and round robin decides among them. That order is worth knowing: skills are a filter, round robin is a turn-taker.

See also

• Capacity rules to balance the workload
• Using skills to route tickets
• Why an agent receives no tickets