You can auto-assign incoming conversations to agents or groups in Freshchat. You do this by defining rules based on:

  • Message properties—such as message text, email body, and message source
  • Conversation properties—such as priority and skill
  • App properties—such as median response time and number of agents online
  • User properties—such as language and total sessions
  • Account properties—such as name, address, industry type, and tags
  • Custom properties defined by your organization

For example, you might have multiple support teams distributed across different regions or assigned to specific query types. With Assignment Rules, you can redirect the customer to the right person or team.


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How to set up Assignment Rules

As an admin, you can set up Assignment Rules:

  1. Go to Admin Settings > Configuration and Workflows > Conversation Assignment Rules.
  2. Click Create rule to open the Add a New Assignment Rule panel.
  3. Give a descriptive name to your rule.
  4. Set up the rule conditions in the "If" block.
    • Select whether users should match any or all of the condition blocks you define.
    • Within a condition block, choose the properties to match. Click Plus to add a condition within the block and toggle Or or And based on if any or all properties should be matched.
    • Click Plus outside a condition block to add a new condition block.
  5. Set up the follow-up action in the "Then" block, and click Save.
    • Select the specific agent or group to assign.


For example, the following rule assigns a conversation to the selected agent when the Priority is Urgent, AND when EITHER the Industry is Government OR the Business is Prospect.


Note: If you have set up Business hours in Freshchat you can create rules based on your Business hours setting.

How Assignment Rules are prioritized

When you have multiple rules set up, they'll be listed on the Conversation Assignment Rules page. The order of your rules matters. Messages are assigned based on the first rule matched.


The order of your conditions within a rule also matters. Freshchat will match the first condition of a rule and only then check the subsequent conditions within the rule.


You can drag your rules to reorder them, use the Status toggle to enable or disable them, and use the overflow menu to Edit or Delete them.


Assignment rules also take priority over other Freshchat features:

  • IntelliAssign—When a new message comes in, it will be first checked against Assignment Rules. If no rules match, the message will be routed through IntelliAssign.
  • Topics—Assignment Rules will also override any Topics to group mapping you have configured.

Examples

Let's say you have a support team that deals with payment or refund-related queries, and you want to route all messages containing the word refund or payment to that group in Freshchat. You can write a rule to achieve this:

  • IF the message text contains EITHER "refund" OR "payment", AND message sent from channel equals EITHER "Payment and billing", "Exchange and refunds", OR "Chat with us".
  • THEN assign the conversation to the Billing support group.


Similarly, you can create a rule for your site visitors. Maybe your highest-grossing state is California (USA), and you want to route all visitors from California to your Pro Support group to ensure they get the best help you can offer.


You can use your user's country or browser language to assign teams. Create a rule for each language and each team.