Distributing new tickets evenly across available agents so no one is overloaded or skipped.
Paired with presence, round-robin skips agents who are away. The full set of queue mechanics is in round-robin, collision detection, and presence.
How it works
The queue keeps a rotating pointer over the pool of eligible agents. Each new ticket goes to the next agent in line, then the pointer advances. Over a shift the load evens out without a lead manually dealing out tickets. Most implementations skip anyone marked away via presence, and respect role or team boundaries so a ticket only lands with someone allowed to handle it.
Why it matters
- No cherry-picking. Tickets are assigned, not chosen, so easy ones don’t get scooped while hard ones rot unowned.
- Clear ownership. Every ticket has a name on it the moment it arrives, which is what an first-response-time target depends on.
- Even load. No single agent absorbs a spike alone.
- Predictable coverage. Because the rotation is automatic, coverage holds even when a lead isn’t around to hand out work.
Common pitfalls
Plain round-robin ignores how much work each agent already holds — a fairer variant is load-based assignment, which routes to whoever has the fewest open tickets. It also can’t see skills: a billing question may land with someone who can’t resolve it, so many teams scope round-robin per team or queue. And without collision detection, two agents can still open the same conversation. As an example, a SaaS support desk might run round-robin inside a tier-1 queue while a separate skill-based rule peels off security reports. Cherryrise applies round-robin through its automation rules, scoped by team and gated on presence; see the workflow engine or the deeper write-up on assignment and collision.
How Cherryrise handles it
In Cherryrise, round-robin is an action you attach to an automation rule rather than a single global toggle. That means you can run separate rotations per team or per queue, condition the rule on tags or channel so the right pool gets the ticket, and let presence remove anyone who is away. Collision detection sits alongside it, so even when two agents land near the same conversation they get warned before they both reply.