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. It is account-wide and needs omnichannel routing.

Round robin hands work out evenly in turn, which is fair and blind to how difficult each piece is. It is account-wide and needs omnichannel routing.

Turn it on

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules and select Omnichannel routing > Routing configuration.
2. Under Assignment method, select Round robin.
3. Save.

Available agents receive in turn, across email, messaging and calls. Email here includes web forms, side conversations and tickets made through the API.

It is a single account-wide setting, not something you vary per queue, and it needs omnichannel routing switched on. With focus mode also on, round robin only considers agents who are not busy on a conflicting channel.

What counts as a turn

Round robin looks at when each agent last received work for that channel, and three different things reset that clock:

• Any assignment at all, including one somebody made by hand.
• A call or messaging ticket being offered, whether or not the agent took it.
• A ticket assigned to them being reopened.

The middle one is the surprise. An agent who was offered a conversation and let it pass goes to the back of the queue as if they had taken it, which looks from the outside like round robin skipping them.

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 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 decides the outcome: 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