How to Set Up Round-Robin Assignment in Front (2026)

Round robin vs load balancing: the real difference

Both methods auto-assign inbound conversations across a group of teammates, but the way they handle availability is where they split — and picking the wrong one is how conversations go missing.

Round robin cycles through teammates in order. Front assigns each new conversation to the next person in the group, then the next, evenly rotating. The catch, per Front's guide to round robin vs. load balancing, is that round robin only assigns to teammates who are online at the moment the message arrives. If everyone in the group is offline, the conversation simply isn't assigned — there's no queue to hold it, and a teammate who comes online a minute later won't be handed the one they missed. Round robin suits teams where someone is essentially always available and you want a clean, even rotation.

Load balancing assigns by current workload. Instead of a blind rotation, Front gives the new conversation to the teammate with the fewest open assigned shared conversations — up to a limit you set. Critically, load balancing queues conversations: if everyone has hit their cap, the rule pauses and resumes assigning as people clear bandwidth, so no conversation is missed. It's the better fit for teams with fluctuating availability or lumpy volume.

That last row matters: per Front's load balancing setup docs, the load balancing feature is available on the Professional plan or above, while a plain round-robin rotation is available more broadly. Front's pricing tiers spell out exactly what unlocks where.

Set up round-robin assignment (step by step)

Round robin lives inside a workspace rule — the same When → If → Then engine covered in Front rules explained. Here's the build:

1. Open Workspace settings → Rules and macros, then click Create rule. (Only workspace or company admins can create shared rules.)
2. Choose the Assign to teammate rule template as your starting point.
3. Set the When (trigger) to An inbound message is received — the moment a fresh conversation lands.
4. Add an If (condition) to scope it, e.g. Conversation is in your Customer Support inbox, so the rule only fires for the right queue.
5. In the Then (action), choose Assign to teammate, select the group of teammates who should share the load, and set the distribution method to round robin.
6. Name the rule something legible ("Round-robin new support emails"), save, and toggle it on.

From then on, every inbound message matching that inbox rotates evenly across your selected teammates who are online. There's no cap here by design — round robin distributes evenly rather than by current workload, so it deliberately ignores the load-balance limit.

Gate assignment on who's actually available

Auto-assignment is only helpful if it hands work to people who can act on it. Front handles this with availability statuses, and the rule engine respects them.

Per Front's documentation, rules will not assign conversations to teammates who are marked as Out of office or Busy. So a teammate who flips their status to Busy for a focus block, or Out of office for the day, is automatically skipped by both round robin and load balancing — you don't need a separate condition for it. This is what stops the classic failure mode of a round-robin rule cheerfully assigning tickets to someone on vacation.

The practical upshot: encourage the team to keep their availability status honest. A load-balancing queue can only route around people who've marked themselves unavailable; if someone stays "online" while away, the rule will still route to them and the conversation stalls. Availability is the input that makes the whole system trustworthy.

Cap conversations per teammate (load balancing)

Round robin distributes evenly no matter how buried anyone is. If you'd rather protect people from overload, you want load balancing with per-teammate limits — and the cap is set in its own place, not inside the rule.

1. Go to Workspace settings → Rules and macros and open the Assignment limits tab.
2. Under the Assignment limit column, enter a number for each teammate — the maximum open shared conversations they can hold at once. Use the checkboxes to apply the same limit to several teammates in one go.
3. Note the ceiling: the maximum limit is 100 per teammate per workspace.
4. Back in Rules, create (or edit) your Assign to teammate rule, and in the Then action pick Load balancing as the method instead of round robin.

Now Front assigns each new conversation to whoever currently holds the fewest open ones, never pushing anyone past their cap. When everyone is at their limit, the rule doesn't drop the message — it pauses and resumes assigning as teammates free up bandwidth. One honest caveat worth repeating: the assignment limit applies only to the load-balancing action. A plain Assign to teammate rule or a round robin rule will happily blow past those numbers, because they don't consult the limit at all.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Front's assignment engine is deterministic and dependable, which is exactly its virtue: it moves the right conversation to the right person in a predictable way, every time. But there are real edges worth naming.

The cap sits at 100 per teammate per workspace, and load balancing itself is Professional-plan-and-up — a smaller team on a lower tier gets round robin but not workload-aware distribution. Availability is only as good as the statuses people set; a stale "online" quietly breaks the routing. And most fundamentally, assignment decides who handles a conversation — it does nothing about the content. It can hand a billing question to the least-busy agent, but it can't read the question, pull the customer's invoice, and answer it. The teammate still starts from zero.

That's the seam where an AI agent layer fits — not to replace assignment, but to shrink and pre-solve the queue before it's ever distributed. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists precisely for the reasoning work a rotation can't do. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Front you already use through the live Macha–Front connector — it does not replace Front, your shared inboxes, or your assignment rules. You keep round robin and load balancing doing what they're good at: fairly distributing whatever's left. But before a conversation is round-robined to a person, Macha's agent reads it, understands intent rather than keywords, and drafts or sends a grounded reply — pulling a real order or account status through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something the agent can call. Fewer conversations reach the rotation, and the ones that do arrive already triaged. If you want the mechanics, connecting Front to Macha to route conversations to AI walks through it, and Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution — automation and reasoning have different costs, and it's honest to price them that way.

The clean division of labour: let Front distribute conversations deterministically, and layer an agent on top to answer the ones a rotation can only hand off. For the systems assignment plugs into, see the wider Front shared inbox model and how SLA policies keep the distributed work on time.

FAQ

What's the difference between round robin and load balancing in Front? Round robin rotates conversations evenly through online teammates and ignores workload; if everyone is offline it doesn't assign and doesn't queue. Load balancing assigns each conversation to the teammate with the fewest open shared conversations, respects a per-teammate cap, and queues messages when everyone is at their limit so nothing is missed.

Where do I set up round-robin assignment? In a workspace rule. Go to Workspace settings → Rules and macros → Create rule, use the Assign to teammate template, trigger it on an inbound message, then in the Then action select your teammates and set the method to round robin. Only workspace or company admins can create shared rules.

How do I cap how many conversations a teammate gets? Open Workspace settings → Rules and macros → Assignment limits, and enter a maximum per teammate (up to 100 per workspace). That cap is only honoured by the load-balancing action — round robin and plain "Assign to teammate" rules ignore it.

Does Front skip teammates who are away? Yes. Rules will not assign conversations to teammates marked Out of office or Busy, so both round robin and load balancing route around anyone who's set themselves unavailable. Keeping availability statuses accurate is what makes the routing reliable.

Do I need a paid plan for this? Round-robin rotation is available broadly, but load balancing (workload-aware distribution with per-teammate limits) requires the Professional plan or above. See Front's pricing tiers for the exact breakdown.

Ready to turn "assigned to a person" into "already answered"? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.