> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tied.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Assignment policies
> Auto-assignment, round-robin and load balancing.
Tied runs two different assignment mechanisms today, and knowing which one is actually live in your account matters more than any individual setting on this page.
## The baseline: round robin per inbox
Turn on auto-assignment for an inbox, and every open conversation with nobody on it goes to the next available member in a rotating queue. The rotation only considers agents who are online and who belong to the inbox — or, for a conversation assigned to a team, members of that team specifically.
**Enterprise adds a capacity cap on top of the rotation.** An inbox can set a maximum number of
open conversations one agent may hold at once. Once an agent hits that cap, the rotation skips them
until they close something — which is the actual load-balancing mechanism running today, distinct
from the fair-distribution fields described below.
This is the mechanism actually moving conversations: at conversation creation, and — on accounts with the `assignment_v2` flag enabled — via a periodic sweep that also picks up anything still sitting unassigned rather than waiting for its next status change.
## Assignment policies — a newer configuration layer
An assignment policy is a named, enable-able record with:
* An **order** — round robin everywhere; Enterprise adds a balanced option.
* A **conversation priority** for which conversation gets pulled first — earliest created, or longest waiting.
* A **fair-distribution limit and window**, meant to cap how many conversations one agent absorbs in a period.
A policy attaches to an inbox one at a time — attaching a new one replaces the old rather than stacking with it.
These fields are real, validated, and exposed through the API — `fair_distribution_limit` defaults
to 100, `fair_distribution_window` defaults to 3600 seconds, and `conversation_priority` is an enum
of `earliest_created` or `longest_waiting`. Nothing reads them at the point a conversation is
actually assigned, though. Setting them today is configuration only — it does not change who gets a
conversation. The round-robin path described above, plus the Enterprise capacity cap, is what
actually decides that.
## The `assignment_v2` flag
This flag turns on the periodic sweep job described above, so an unassigned conversation does not just wait for its next status change to get picked up. It also gates the enterprise per-inbox capacity cap. On Tied's own cloud, the sweep skips accounts still on the default free plan.
## Team assignment
Assigning a conversation to a team runs the identical round robin over that team's own members, provided the team allows auto-assignment — which is why moving something to a team is often enough on its own, without also hand-picking a person.
## Next
Who gets notified when a response deadline is missed.
Team membership and the auto-assign switch it depends on.
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