Smart Routing

Smart Routing automatically assigns incoming customer conversations to the best available team member based on rules like skills, workload, availability, or round-robin distribution.

What is Smart Routing?

Smart Routing (also called intelligent routing or automatic assignment) is a system that automatically distributes incoming customer conversations to the right team member. Instead of a manager manually assigning every message, the system does it based on rules you define.

Think of it as a smart receptionist: a billing question goes to the billing person, a technical issue goes to the tech specialist, and if nobody's available, it queues with a priority flag.

Why Does It Matter?

Without routing, one of two things happens: either one person becomes the bottleneck (checking every message and forwarding manually), or messages sit unassigned until someone notices. Both lead to slow response times and frustrated customers.

  • Faster responses: Messages reach the right person immediately -- no forwarding chain
  • Fair workload: Round-robin ensures no one agent gets overwhelmed while others sit idle
  • Better quality: Specialists handle their area of expertise, leading to more accurate answers
  • Accountability: Every conversation has an assigned owner -- nothing falls through the cracks

Types of Routing

Round-robin: The simplest approach. New conversations are distributed evenly across available agents in order: Agent A, Agent B, Agent C, then back to A. Fair and predictable.

Skill-based: Conversations are matched to agents with specific skills. A message in Spanish goes to a Spanish-speaking agent. A technical question goes to a tech specialist. You define the rules.

Load-based: The system considers how many active conversations each agent currently has. If Agent A has 8 open tickets and Agent B has 3, the next conversation goes to Agent B.

Keyword/AI-based: The system analyzes the message content and routes accordingly. A message containing "invoice" or "payment" goes to billing. A message with "broken" or "not working" goes to technical support.

Smart Routing in SendSeven

In SendSeven's Unified Inbox, new conversations can be assigned automatically: by round robin or to the least busy member, across the whole team or only among members with a certain tag. Tags work as skills: each member gets the tags for the topics they handle.

A Flow can ask the customer for the topic with buttons, and its "Open conversation" step assigns by tag. Or an AI agent tags the conversation when it hands over, and a skill goal with "Assign conversation" assigns it to a member with that tag. Business hours count: a Flow can run only during or only outside your business hours, and an AI agent hands over only while your team is available. Read the step-by-step guide.

Additional features:

  • Real-time presence: See who's online, away, or at capacity before routing decisions
  • Manual override: Agents can reassign conversations with internal handoff notes
  • @mention assignment: Type @name in the chat to instantly assign a conversation to a colleague
  • Bot-to-human handoff: AI chatbots can route to specific agent groups when they detect a question they can't handle