Inbox: Restrict Agents from Reassigning Tickets/Contact
J
Jacqueline N
Business problem:
Allowing agents to reassign tickets to others enables them to pass responsibilities, potentially leading to tickets not being handled efficiently and requiring managers to constantly monitor the platform to ensure proper ticket management.
Desired outcome:
- Implement a restriction that prevents agents from reassigning tickets to other agents.
- Ensure that once a ticket is assigned to an agent, it remains with that agent until resolved or escalated by a manager.
- Provide managers with the ability to monitor and manage ticket assignments without the need for constant oversight.
Use case:
- Enhancing accountability among agents by ensuring they handle their assigned tickets personally and improving the efficiency of ticket resolution.
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
Merged in a post:
control whether Agents can assign conversations to other Agents
José Simão
We would like to request a new permission/control that allows
Owners and Managers
to enable or disable the ability for Agents to assign conversations to other Agents.Currently, Agents can assign conversations to other Agents. We would like Owners and Managers to have a configurable option to control this behavior at the workspace level.
Ideally, the setting could work as follows:
*
Enabled:
Agents can assign conversations to other Agents, as they currently do.*
Disabled:
Agents cannot assign conversations to other Agents. In this case, only Owners and Managers would be able to assign or reassign conversations.* Owners and Managers should always retain the ability to assign conversations regardless of this setting.
This would be particularly useful for organizations that need greater control over conversation routing and assignment, ensuring that conversations are assigned according to the established workflow and team management rules.
The permission should ideally be configurable by Owners and Managers without affecting other Agent permissions or functionality.
Example use case:
In a customer service operation, supervisors/managers need to control the distribution of conversations among agents. Allowing agents to freely reassign conversations can result in conversations being transferred without the supervisor's control. Having a configurable restriction would allow the organization to choose between a flexible assignment model and a supervisor-controlled assignment model.
We believe this feature would provide greater flexibility, governance, and control for teams using respond.io as a customer service platform.
Kutay Duran
We need this as well, both as a restriction and as a full off switch.
Our sales conversations are distributed automatically through Workflows. Agents can still unassign themselves or move a conversation to another user, which breaks the distribution logic and makes assignment data unreliable: conversations return to the Unassigned Inbox after they were already routed, assignment limits are bypassed, and First Response Time and per agent performance figures no longer reflect what actually happened. On a commission based sales team it also creates ownership disputes over who the lead belongs to.
The only options we have today are corrective. We either audit the activity log after the fact or catch the Contact Assignee Updated webhook externally and push the assignment back, which produces extra events and still leaves a window where the conversation sits with the wrong owner.
What we would need is an Agent level restriction that removes the assignment control entirely, so that only Owners, Managers, Workflows and AI Agents can change an assignee. Splitting it into two separate settings would cover more cases: one to block unassigning, another to block transferring to a specific user or team.
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
Merged in a post:
User Settings: Restrict Assignment Actions for Agents
S
Sergio Saire
Business Problem: Agents can unassign themselves, reassign, or manually change the assignee of a conversation — including conversations assigned automatically by Workflows or AI Agents. No Agent restriction prevents this. "Restrict Contact Visibility" only limits what agents see, not what they can do with conversations they already hold.
Impact: agents drop conversations back to the Unassigned Inbox, bypass assignment limits and round-robin distribution, and distort First Response Time and agent performance data. For commission-based sales teams, it also creates lead ownership disputes.
Current mitigations are corrective only: auditing the activity log, or an external automation on the "Contact Assignee Updated" webhook to reassign the conversation back.
Desired Outcome: Add an Agent Advanced Restriction that removes the ability to change assignment:
- Assign/Unassign dropdown hidden or read-only in the Inbox and Contacts drawer
- Agents cannot unassign themselves
- Agents cannot assign or transfer to another user or team
- Only Owners, Managers, Workflows and AI Agents can change assignment
Ideally split into two options, since some businesses want agents to release a conversation but not choose who receives it.
IRIS PINA
This feature is very important for our business. We use automatic lead distribution among our agents, and agents should not be able to unassign themselves or transfer leads to other agents. Only Owners and Administrators should have permission to change conversation assignments. This is essential for maintaining fair lead distribution, accountability, and accurate agent performance metrics. We would greatly appreciate having this permission available as soon as possible.