Skip to main content
Assignment marks who owns a conversation. It is a label your team agrees to respect, not a lock. Three things surprise people, so read them first:
  • Assignment belongs to the contact, not the thread. Assigning one conversation assigns every thread that contact has: DMs and comments, on every channel. One contact has one owner.
  • Assignment does not hide anything. Everyone who can open the Inbox still sees every conversation, assigned or not. It changes a filter, a notification and a webhook, nothing else.
  • Replying takes the conversation. Whenever a teammate sends a reply, the conversation is reassigned to them automatically, even if it was already assigned to someone else. The conversation follows whoever answered it last. That is the default, and an admin can change it to “only claim it if nobody owns it” or to leaving ownership alone: see Conversation settings.
Prefer to watch first? This walkthrough covers dividing inbox work across a team.

​
Assign a conversation

1

Open the conversation

Select it in the Inbox list. The details panel opens on the right.
2

Pick a teammate in Assigned to

Use the Assigned to dropdown and choose a member of your workspace. Choose Unassigned to hand it back to the pool.
Only workspace members appear in the list, and only a real workspace member can be assigned.
Assigning is silent when nothing really changes. Picking the person who is already assigned, or unassigning, sends no notification and fires no webhook.

​
What assignment actually does

When you assign a conversation to someone new:
  • They get an in-app bell notification that links straight to the thread. See Notifications.
  • DMLY sends a conversation.assigned webhook, if you use them. See Webhooks.
  • The conversation now matches that person in the assignee filter.
That is the whole list. Assignment grants no extra access, removes no access, and does not change what the contact sees.
When a teammate replies to a conversation assigned to someone else, the assignment moves to them with no notification to the previous assignee. If ownership matters to you, an admin can set Who owns the conversation after a reply to Only claim it if nobody owns it in Conversation settings, so a reply can never take a chat off its owner.

​
How a team divides the work

The practical pattern is a filter, not a rule engine.
1

Everyone works their own queue

Open the filters and set the assignee filter to your own name. That is your list for the day.
2

Someone triages Unassigned

Set the assignee filter to Unassigned to see everything nobody has picked up, and assign each one out.
3

Close what's finished

Use Mark as done so the conversation leaves the Open folder. Nothing closes by itself, and by default any new message from the contact reopens it. See Conversation status.
Set the filter to Anyone to go back to the full list.
Use Internal notes to hand context over with the conversation. Notes are team-only, and mentioning a teammate in a note notifies them.

​
Assign automatically

The Inbox has no routing rules of its own, but three things can pick an owner without you:

Round-robin new conversations

A workspace setting, off by default: Give new conversations an owner hands each brand-new conversation to whoever has the fewest Open conversations right now.

Assign in a flow

An Assign node or a human-handover node sets the owner as part of a flow.

Round-robin with AI

The AI agent can share chats out on the same rule: the teammate holding the fewest Open conversations wins.
Round-robin, the AI agent and both flow nodes all send the new owner a bell notification naming what assigned it. None of them fires conversation.assigned; only assigning by hand from the details panel does that. The automatic claim from replying is the quiet one: no bell and no webhook, which is why a conversation can change hands without anybody being told. When a flow hands a conversation to a human, DMLY drops a note into the thread so the agent can see why it landed with them. By default the node also pauses the bot (Pause bot replies) and tells the contact someone will be with them shortly; both are editable on the node. Take over manually with Pause bot (human takeover) in the details panel.

​
The “On call duty” toggle is not an inbox setting

On call duty / Off duty in the sidebar controls WhatsApp voice calls only: it decides whether inbound WhatsApp calls ring you. It has no effect on chat assignment or routing, and it only appears when a WhatsApp channel has calling enabled. See WhatsApp calling.
DMLY has no availability or on-call setting for chat. An away teammate still receives assignments, and round-robin will hand them new conversations too; move their conversations by hand.
The whole Inbox can be hidden from a role. Check the member’s role under Roles and permissions. The same settings also mask contact phone numbers and email addresses in the conversation panel.