Unassign yourself from a conversation
The one assignment action an agent can take — and what happens to the conversation afterwards is not what most people expect.
An agent can take themselves off a conversation but cannot hand it to a colleague. The reasoning is that a conversation is workload rather than a record, and pushing workload onto somebody who has not agreed to it is how queues get gamed.
The part people get wrong is what happens next. Unassigning does not send the conversation to a supervisor or into a triage queue — it returns it to the unassigned state, which is the same state a bot-handled conversation is in. If the channel is pointed at a bot, the bot may well pick it up again.
Steps
Open the conversation assigned to you
Only conversations assigned to you are visible to you in the first place, so your Inbox is already the list of everything you could unassign.
This is also why you should act before you unassign: once it is gone, you may not be able to find it again.
Leave a note before you unassign
Do this first, because once it is unassigned you may not be able to see it again. Whoever picks it up reads the contact panel — one line about what you tried is the difference between a handover and a restart for the customer.
Unassign yourself
An agent can take themselves off. An agent cannot assign it to somebody else — that would be pushing work onto a colleague who has not agreed to it.
If a specific person should take it, say so to a manager. Unassigning is not a way of routing something to somebody in particular.
Understand where it goes
It becomes unassigned — the same state as bot-handled. If the channel routes to a bot, expect the bot to be able to answer it again, mid-conversation.
That is often fine for a simple question. It is rarely what you want after a difficult exchange.
Ask a manager if it needs a specific person
Unassigning is not routing. If the customer needs the person who knows about billing, say so — only a manager or admin can assign them.
Check it worked
Check the contact's activity feed. Your note should be there, and the assignee change should appear as an audit entry, so the next person can see what happened.
The parts people get wrong
- Unassigning does not undo your replies. The thread stays whole and the customer sees one continuous conversation.
- Contacts and tasks work the opposite way — anyone can assign either to anyone, because they are records rather than workload.