Table of Contents
Inbound Support: Auto-Assign Customers to a Team or Dedicated Agent
Updated
by Joshua Lim
Respond.io’s default Contact Assignment behavior is the pick and assign system. As your company grows, this manual process can be time-consuming and raise a potential problem in ensuring a fair inbound conversation distribution among your support agents. These issues can be easily avoided by setting up a Workflow with automatic assignment logic based on your business support needs.
Benefits of Automatic Assignment
Use auto-assignment to:
- Save support agents and managers time compared to manual assignment processes.
- Improve response time as customers will be assigned to a support agent quickly.
Methods for Automatic Assignment
- Auto-assign customers to a team and set assignment logic based on your business needs.
- Auto-assign customers to a dedicated agent.
Auto-Assign to a team and set assignment logic based on your business needs
Adjust the auto-assignment logic based on your business support needs and priorities.
Support preferences | Configuration |
- Resolve issues as quickly as possible - Focused on reducing support costs | Low-Cost Support Auto-Assignment |
- Provide great support - Views excellent support as a competitive advantage | High-Quality Support Auto-Assignment |
Method Objectives
- Select the Workflow template and customize steps as needed.
- Automatically assign customers to agents with assignment logic based on your support preferences.
Workflow Setup
There are Workflow templates set up by our team that you can use immediately. These templates can be edited to fit your business needs.
Select the Workflow template and customize steps as needed
For Low-Cost Support, click Assignment: Round Robin + Online Only > Use template

For High Quality Support, click Assignment: Least Open Contacts > Use template

The Workflow template is set up with an Assign To step to automatically assign customers to a specific team with online agents only in a round robin sequence.

Customize your welcome message as desired.
Edit the Assign To Step to set up auto assignment based on your support preferences.
Low-Cost Support Auto-Assignment Configuration
2. Select your support team in the Select Team dropdown list.
3. Assignment Logic should remain as “Assign to users round robin” to distribute Contacts equally among agents.
4. In Advanced Settings, the “Only assign to online users” toggle should remain turned on.
5. Finally, click Save and Publish to activate the Workflow.

High-Quality Support Auto-Assignment Configuration
2. Select your support team in the Select Team dropdown list.
3. Assignment Logic should remain as “Assign to the user with least open contacts” to allow agents to provide high quality support.
4. In Advanced Settings, turn on the “Only assign to online users” toggle.
5. Finally, click Save and Publish to activate the Workflow.

Auto-Assign Customers to a Dedicated Agent
This method is useful when your business provides dedicated support agents to a special group of customers such as VIPs.
Method Objectives
- Configure the Assign To step to automatically assign customers to a specific user
Configure the Assign To step to automatically assign customers to a specific user
Here’s how to configure the Assign To step to auto-assign Contacts to a dedicated agent:
- Click the Assign To step
- In the Action dropdown list, select Assign to a specific user
- Select the dedicated agent in the Assign To dropdown list.

Once a support agent has resolved a customer’s issue, close the conversation to remove the Contact from the Open Conversation queue, reducing the noise in the agent’s inbox view.