Home · Blog · Distributing conversations between operators: who on the team answers the customer

Distributing conversations between operators: who on the team answers the customer

November 5, 2026 · Command CHBT · Conversations, Support

While a business answers customers single-handedly, the question “who will answer” does not come up. As soon as there are two or more operators, confusion starts: two managers write different things to the same customer, and a third conversation hangs unanswered because everyone thought a colleague had taken it. Here is how to share conversations across a team in CHBT: manually, automatically by workload and with breaks — and how to organise the work so no customer is left without an answer.

Where an operator’s conversations come from

Most conversations are handled by the bot: it answers frequent questions, collects requests, accepts payment. A person gets a conversation in two cases:

The bot handed the conversation over. The flow has an Operator block: the conversation goes to Waiting for an answer, the bot goes silent in it, the team gets a notification.
The operator stepped in. Any conversation can be opened in Conversations and answered manually.

Distribution covers the first case: which team member gets a conversation the bot handed to a person.

Operator status: Online and Away

Each team member has their own status in Conversations:

Online — “Taking new conversations”. The operator takes part in distribution.
Away — “No new conversations are assigned to me; mine stay with me”. Lunch, a meeting, end of shift.

Online means not only the chosen status but also an open Conversations section. If an employee has closed the dashboard, new conversations do not land on them, even if they forgot to switch to Away. The status menu shows who is in Conversations right now: the line “In Conversations now” with a list of names.

Important: Away does not take already assigned conversations away from the operator. If a customer replies in their conversation, it stays with them — so the customer does not have to explain the task again to another person.

Automatic distribution by workload

The owner or an admin can turn on Assign conversations automatically. After that everything works by itself:

The bot hands the conversation to a person with the Operator block.
If the conversation has no assignee yet, CHBT picks the online operator with the fewest open conversations.
If several have the same workload — the one who was assigned a conversation longest ago.
Only the assigned operator gets the notification, not the whole team.

If nobody is online, the conversation stays Unassigned and everyone gets the notification. So at night or on weekends the conversation is not lost: the first person to open Conversations will see it.

Automatic assignment needs no rules — it balances the workload by itself. A newcomer on their first shift will not get ten conversations while an experienced colleague has two.

Manual assignment

Automation is good for the flow, but sometimes a conversation needs to go to a specific person: a regular customer is handled by their manager, a difficult question by a senior specialist. The conversation card has Assign operator — choose the employee, and the conversation moves to them.

The “whoever replied, owns it” rule works even more simply: if an operator replies in an unassigned conversation, it becomes theirs. The person on duty picked up the conversation — nobody else will write to the customer in parallel.

Assignment does not lock the conversation: a colleague can open it and reply if backup is needed. The chat history shows who on the team wrote what.

Filters: Mine, Unassigned, All

When the team has more than one person, filters appear in Conversations:

Mine — conversations you are responsible for. The operator’s working list for the shift.
Unassigned — not assigned to anyone. The shift lead should check here: these are conversations that arrived while everyone was away, or before automatic assignment was turned on.
All — the full list, if you need to find a customer or help a colleague.

A good habit: at the start of a shift — Unassigned, then Mine. At the end — make sure Mine has no conversations where the customer waits until tomorrow without a warning.

Team roles

Owner — the creator of the project: plan, payment, settings, team.
Admin — manages bots and the team, turns on automatic assignment.
Operator — answers in Conversations, changes their own status, assigns and snoozes conversations.

You can invite colleagues starting from the Basic plan. On the Free plan the project has one operator — the owner, so team statuses and filters are not shown: there is nobody to distribute to.

What helps the team answer consistently

Quick replies — templates for frequent questions: delivery terms, bank details, address. An answer in one click, the same for every operator.
Notes — “Operator note — visible to the team only”. This is where you write what the customer does not need to know: “call back after 15:00”, “asked for a discount, check with the manager”. The next operator opens the conversation and is up to speed right away.
Customer card — phone, email, tags and everything the bot collected. No need to ask again what the customer already told the bot.
Snooze — if there is no answer yet, snooze the conversation for an hour, three hours, until tomorrow or until Monday. It comes back on time with a reminder, and if the customer writes earlier — right away. Snoozed conversations sit in Snoozed and do not clutter the main list.

How to organise shifts: an example for a team of three

The owner turns on Assign conversations automatically.
Two operators work from 9 to 18 and from 13 to 22, the third on weekends. Each opens Conversations at the start of the shift and sets Online, and Away at the end.
In the flow the bot hands conversations to a person only during working hours, and at night collects a request — how to set this up is covered in the article on a bot after hours.
In the morning the first operator goes through Unassigned — night requests the bot could not hand over.
The manager assigns regular customers to themselves manually; automation distributes the rest.

This setup does not need a separate dispatcher: the workload balances itself, and empty windows when nobody is online show up as Unassigned conversations.

Common mistakes

Forgot Away. The operator left but kept the dashboard open — conversations keep landing on them. Switch the status when you leave for long.
Automatic assignment is off. Then everyone gets the notification and everyone counts on a colleague. Turn it on as soon as there is more than one operator.
Nobody checks Unassigned. Everything that arrived while everyone was offline ends up here. Decide who goes through this list.
Handover to a person at night. If the Operator block fires at any time, the customer waits for an answer until morning. Separate working and non-working hours with a Condition.
Replies without notes. Without a note the next operator starts the conversation from scratch. Two lines in a note save the customer five minutes.

Conversations and operators Bot or operator: handing over a conversation A chatbot after hours Plans