Two questions decide whether a support inbox feels calm or chaotic. How much can each agent see? And who gets the next conversation that comes in? If the answers are unclear, agents either step on each other or leave conversations sitting in a queue nobody owns. In HellouOne both answers live in one place, Settings, under Assignment, and only administrators can change them. This post walks through what is there and how to set it for your team size.
Agent visibility: five levels, pick the lowest that works
Visibility controls which conversations an agent can open. There are five levels, and each one includes the previous:
Only their own conversations: the ones assigned to them and the ones they take part in.
Their own and their teams': plus anything assigned to a team they belong to.
Their own, their teams' and unassigned: plus conversations in their inboxes that nobody has taken yet. This level is what gives an agent the Unassigned tab.
Everything in their inboxes: every conversation in the inboxes they are a member of.
Everything in the account: all conversations and inboxes, like an administrator.
Administrators always see everything. The help center's advice is to pick the lowest level that still lets the team work: a small team usually prefers Everything in their inboxes, while an operation with several teams and sensitive data tends to choose Their own and their teams'. Save with Save changes below the list.
Assign only to agents who are online
With this rule on, automatic assignment skips anyone marked busy or offline. There is a safety net: if nobody eligible is online, the conversation is still assigned to someone in the group instead of waiting, so no conversation is left without an owner. That detail matters more than it looks. The failure mode of online-only routing in other tools is the 3 a.m. conversation that nobody is assigned to and nobody finds in the morning.
Priority order: who gets it first
Priority decides who receives a conversation before anyone else. Everyone starts at priority 1, which means taking turns. Give one person priority 1 and the rest priority 2, and that person receives everything while they are online; the others step in when they are not. For that handover to work, Assign only to agents who are online has to be on, and the page reminds you if it is not. Priority can be set in three places:
Inboxes: each member's priority within an inbox.
Teams: each member's priority within a team, across every inbox that team serves.
Inbox plus team: who leads a team in one specific inbox, without changing the team elsewhere. Useful when the same team is staffed by different people depending on the channel.
Administrators are never assigned conversations automatically, so they do not appear in these lists.
A thank-you should not reopen a ticket
A small rule with a big effect on your metrics: when a customer writes only "thanks" or "done" after their conversation was resolved, the message stays in the resolved conversation. It does not reopen it, does not create a new one, and gets no reply from anyone, not even from an AI agent. Any other message, including a thank-you followed by a question, reopens as usual. You choose how long the rule applies after resolving, from 1 to 168 hours. Short thank-yous are recognised on their own; with AI review enabled, a model reads the longer ones ("thank you so much, you were all great") and keeps the conversation closed only when it is sure. The AI review needs the AI classifications included in your plan.
How to use it in HellouOne
Assignment settings are part of every HellouOne account. A practical setup for a team of two to five: visibility Everything in their inboxes, online-only assignment on, everyone at priority 1, thank-you rule on for 24 hours. For an operation with several teams: visibility Their own and their teams', one team per inbox or channel, priority 1 for the lead agent of each team and 2 for the rest, and online-only assignment on so the lead's absence hands conversations over automatically. Review the Unattended view in Conversations for a week afterwards; if it stays empty, the rules are doing their job. And if you are unsure how a change will play out, ask LIA: she can propose the assignment change and you approve it before anything is applied.
Learn more in the help center: Assignment: what agents see and who receives each conversation.
