Guide

How to triage and assign conversations

Summary

Assignment
Triaging a shared inbox
How to find conversations assigned to a teammate?
Tasks
Keyboard Shortcuts

Assignment

Missive offers an intuitive assignment flow. Out of the box, any conversation can be assigned to individuals or teams (Sales, Support, etc.).

Note The assignment flows described here can be used with shared accounts of any kind (email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Twilio SMS) as well as shared addresses.

When a conversation gets assigned to you, it appears at the top of your Inbox.

Every conversations can be assigned — You can easily assign conversations to anyone.

Assigned conversations can be closed from the same menu. Upon being closed, conversations are moved to the Closed mailbox for future reference.

How to triage a shared inbox

When dealing with a lot of requests, it can be counter-productive for everyone to see all messages all the time. You may want to add a triage step where some teammate(s) dispatch messages to the relevant people. In Missive, you can do this with a Team Inbox:

Let’s say we enable a Team Inbox for the account orders@missiveapp.com and select the 🎯Sales team. All team members can now see incoming messages in the 🎯Sales team inbox from the left sidebar.

When creating a team, you can define two types of users:

Active members receive notifications for new messages. They see conversations listed in the Team Inboxes mailbox in addition to the team inbox.

Observers do not receive notifications and see conversations listed in the team inbox only. This is perfect for managers who want to monitor the work being done but don’t want to be flooded with notifications.

After a message is received and a conversation is assigned, it is removed from the Team inbox and appears in Inbox and Assigned to me for the assigned user(s). Replying to an unassigned message will automatically assign it to you.

Send & close button — Replying to an assigned conversation will show Send & Close.

Finally, if a new reply is received in a closed conversation, the conversation will be moved away from Closed back into the assignee’s Assigned to me and Inbox. Those replies will only be seen by the assignees, which is ideal to reduce the number of interruptions your team faces daily.

Note Need to balance the assigned workload? Missive lets you automatically distribute your team's workload with four distinct balancing methods. You can select one of them by creating a rule with the Assign user(s) action.

How to find conversations assigned to a teammate?

You can apply the Assigned to filter from any mailbox, or directly from the Assigned to others mailbox:

Note The Assigned to me, Assigned to others and Closed mailboxes may be hidden by default. To open them, either search for them or click More on the left. Bonus tip: Pressing the Alt key while selecting a mailbox will open it without adding it to the left bar.

Tasks

For conversations that are used as projects, granular assignment of tasks can also be used. You will get the same consistent experience whether an individual task or a whole conversation is assigned to you: the conversation will appear in Assigned to me as well as your Inbox.

Keyboard shortcuts

You can easily assign, reopen and close conversations using the keyboard, just press Command+shift+K on Mac to open the assignment pop-up, then navigate and select actions using arrows and the Return key.

Last updated on March 20, 2023