Automation
Queues & routing
A queue is a team inbox with a routing rule. It answers one question: when a message arrives, who picks it up?
Manage queues under Settings → Queues & Routing.
What a queue holds
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name & colour | How it appears in the inbox tree and on dashboards |
| Members | The agents eligible to receive its cases |
| Routing strategy | How the next case is handed out |
| Max cases per agent | An agent at this many open cases is skipped |
| Default | The queue that new inbound conversations land in |
The routing strategies
| Strategy | Behaviour | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Round robin | Each new case goes to the next member in order, wrapping around | Even distribution across a shift |
| Fewest assignments | Goes to the member with the fewest open cases right now | Uneven case weights, part-time agents |
| Random | Any member with remaining capacity | Small teams where order does not matter |
Round robin remembers its position on the queue itself, so it keeps rotating across restarts.
How a case gets routed
- A message arrives on a channel. The contact is resolved, then the conversation is created in the workspace's default queue.
- The queue's strategy picks an agent from its members. Online agents are preferred when presence data is available.
- Agents at their max cases per agent limit are skipped. If every member is at the limit, the case stays in the queue unassigned and appears in the Unassigned view for anyone to grab.
- The global capacity limit (Settings → Queues & Routing) is checked first. If the workspace already has more open cases than the limit, routing stops assigning entirely and cases wait. This protects a small team from a flood.
Moving a case between queues
- By hand: change the queue on the case, or from a ticket.
- By automation: the Route to queue action moves the case and re-runs that queue's strategy to pick an agent.
- By AI handover: the AI agent's handover configuration names the queue that receives escalations.
Worked example
The demo workspace has three queues:
| Queue | Strategy | Max / agent | Members |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer support (default) | Round robin | 8 | Albert, Katty, Ko |
| IT support | Fewest assignments | 5 | Albert, Luca |
| Sales | Random | unlimited | Katty, Ko, Olivia |
A WhatsApp message from a new customer lands in Customer support and goes to whichever of the three agents is next in the rotation. If that customer is tagged VIP, the VIP → route to Sales automation immediately moves the case to Sales and re-picks an owner there.
Queue counts in the inbox tree and on the Workforce dashboard show open cases, not total history.