If you want to make sure a conversation gets answered by the right person in your company, you should assign it to a particular teammate and team. There are three different ways to do that in Intercom:

When you need to pass a conversation to someone else you can quickly assign the conversation to the best teammate or team who can answer it.

Use the keyboard shortcut A to assign, or select the action icon from below the message composer and select Assign to.

To bulk assign/close conversations, first select the checkboxes next to the conversations you want, and then click the Assign or Close button that appears.

You can also select the pencil icon to bulk edit your conversations which will allow you to perform the following actions:

If you have more than a handful of conversations that need to be updated and you don't want to manually select them, your best bet would be using the REST API and creating a loop over.

The REST API allows you to perform a number of bulk updates to conversations, including closing, snoozing, replying, and assigning conversations.

To perform any of these actions you will need a list of the conversation IDs for your chosen criterium. Directions for how to search for conversations using our API are located here.

When you manually assign a conversation to a specific teammate, the team assignment also remains in place. This means if that teammate switches on away mode, the conversation will be automatically assigned back to the correct team.

Assigning a conversation to a team will remove the teammate assignment, so it can be picked up from that team’s inbox at the right time, or assigned automatically by round robin, or workload management.

Conversations can be assigned automatically using Workflows. To create a Workflow go to Automation > Workflows and click + New workflow.

The best triggers to use for this kind of Workflow are:

Then Apply rules which assign conversations to a team or teammate based on the content of the messages, conversation attributes, how long a customer has been waiting and/or any information about the lead, user or company that you track in Intercom.

For example, if Plan is 'Lite' and Message Content contains 'upgrade', then Assign to 'Customer Success'.

You can then click Save and close and set your Workflow live.

If a conversation doesn’t match any of your Workflow rules, it will be assigned to your default assignee (inbox recipient), which you can select from Settings > Help Desk > Assignments and scrolling down to the Default assignee section at the bottom of the page.

You can control who can reassign conversations that are already assigned to teammates. This ensures your sales and support teams don't lose conversations that they're working on in their own inbox.

Just go to Teammate settings, click Edit on a teammate, and uncheck Can reassign conversations and edit lead or user ownership.

You can view which teammate and team inbox a conversation is assigned to under the Details section which is permanently placed at the top right when using the Help Desk product.

If viewing your inbox using the Table View, there is an Assignee and Team column that shows the team/teammate the conversation is currently assigned to (if the column doesn't appear, you'll need to add it using the + icon.