Chat routing & queues

One page for the organisation-level rules that decide how chats leave the inbox and how they are handed out: whether finishing a workflow resolves the chat, how many open chats automatic routing may give an advisor, which chats still count as active, and the live team queues holding whatever nobody could take.

At a glance


Where	Settings → Chat routing & queues (also linked from the top of Team Members).
Who	Organisation admins and the Account Owner. Members see a "No access" card.
Controls	Resolve chats when a workflow finishes (switch) · Default max open chats per advisor · Activity window (days) · the Queues card with Refresh and Sweep now.
Per-advisor caps	Set on Team Members — the Max open chats (workflows) column — and linked from this page.

How to find it

Sidebar: Settings → Chat routing & queues (under Workflows & Settings). The Team Members page shows a card at the top that links here and reads back the current default cap.

Core concepts

Term	What it means
Load	An advisor's open chats: chats where they are the primary assignee, not resolved or archived, with a workflow still active, and with a message inside the activity window. Group chats and autopilot chats are excluded; tickets are never counted.
Cap	The most chats automatic routing may hand an advisor at once: their own override on Team Members, else the organisation default, else unlimited. `0` = online but never auto-routed.
Team queue	Chats routed to a team while nobody in it had capacity (or was online). The whole team sees them; nobody owns them until someone is handed one, claims it, or an admin sweeps.
Activity window	Only chats with a message — in either direction — in the last N days count toward load or wait in a queue. Default 14; clear it for no window.
Resolve on finish	When on, moving a chat to a workflow's closing stage also marks it Resolved & closed, unless the workflow's own closing rules say Never or the agent unticks it for that close.

Features in depth

Resolve chats when a workflow finishes

Off for every organisation until an admin turns it on. When on, finishing a workflow also resolves the chat (it leaves the open inbox; the chat.resolved webhook carries via: "WORKFLOW"). A chat with a second workflow still active is never resolved this way. Assignees, not only admins, can reopen a resolved chat, and restarting the workflow reopens it too. Each workflow can override the switch in its Closing rules; the agent can untick Also mark chat as resolved for one close — but cannot tick it in an organisation where the switch is off.

Default max open chats per advisor

Applies to every advisor without their own override. Empty = unlimited. Automatic routing — team round-robin, the assign-chat automation's team modes, bot-journey transfers to a team — skips advisors at their cap and leaves the chat in the team queue instead. It governs automatic routing only: self-claim, admin assignment, the ticket-owner preference and a bot journey's transfer to a specific agent can all exceed it.

Activity window

Bounds what "open" means. An open chat nobody has touched for longer than the window stops occupying a slot until it gets a new message, and the same window decides which chats are waiting in a queue — so a team where chats are rarely closed does not freeze. Default 14 days (1–365, or empty for no window). Changing it takes effect on the next routing decision.

Queues

Per team: how many chats are waiting without an owner, how long the oldest has waited, and how many members currently have spare capacity. A row turns red when chats are waiting and nobody can take them. Sweep now hands waiting chats to members with spare capacity immediately — oldest first, least-recently-assigned member first, each team drained on its own so one team's backlog never starves another. The same sweep runs from the Dispatch waiting chats automations; the Pull the next waiting chat automation hands the oldest queued chat to an advisor the moment they finish a workflow.

How it fits with the rest of Lodgestory CRM

Team Members — per-advisor caps and each person's live load.
Workflow Lifecycle Stages — per-workflow closing rules (require a disposition, resolve on finish).
Automations — the recipes that pull, dispatch and escalate queued chats.
Home / Unified Inbox — the Unowned view of queued chats and the "you're at capacity" hint on Assign to me.
Reports — the Chat Stage History and Dispositions exports for dwell time and outcomes.

Errors & FAQ

Everyone shows as at capacity the moment I set a cap. Load counts chats with an active workflow. If your team never finishes workflows, every old chat still counts — shorten the activity window, or close stale workflows first.

A chat sits in the queue although someone is free. They may be offline (availability is checked first), at their own override cap, or not a member of that team. The Queues card's members with capacity column tells you which.

Sweep now says "a sweep is already running". Sweeps are serialised per organisation; try again in a moment.

Changelog

Aug 2026 — Page introduced: the Chat closing & routing controls and the Queues card moved here from Team Members; activity window added.