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Overview

Every channel (email, SMS, phone, chat and Slack) can carry routing rules that decide who picks up an inbound message. Without rules, everything on a channel goes to its single owner or assignee. With them, a channel can hand mornings to one team and nights to another, spread work evenly across a rota, or send a Spanish-language enquiry to the people who can answer it. Rules live on the channel: Settings → Channels → your channel → Routing Rules.

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Reusing one set of rules on several channels

A rule written on a channel belongs to that channel. When you want the same set of rules on more than one. Three support numbers that should all follow the same hours, say. Group them and attach the group instead: Settings → Channels → Routing. A group can be attached to a channel, a team, a sending pool, or a whole channel type (“every phone number”), and a channel picks up the rules from every group that reaches it. Nothing changes for rules you have already written. Each one is its own group of one until you decide otherwise.

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How rules are evaluated

Rules are evaluated top to bottom, and the first one that matches wins. A rule matches when both halves hold:
  1. Its conditions match right now: day of week, time of day, and an optional date range, all read in your workspace’s timezone.
  2. It can name someone available. The person it picks has to clear the rule’s availability gates (below).
If a rule matches the clock but nobody clears its gates, that rule is skipped and the next one is tried. If no rule produces anyone, the message falls back to the channel’s normal assignment, exactly as it would if no rules existed. Routing never leaves an inbound message unassigned.
A rule with no conditions at all always matches. That is the catch-all. Put it last, and it acts as a configurable default that overrides the channel’s static assignment.

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Who a rule picks

Round-robin position is remembered per team, not per rule, so a team that answers phone through one rule and email through another takes one shared turn order across both, rather than keeping two independent ones over the same people. Bookings on that team turn the same order, so someone who has just taken a call is behind the others for the next meeting too.

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Assigned, or offered

Naming someone is one decision; how they get it is another, and the two are set separately. By default one person is assigned and several are offered, you only need to set this when you want something else. A phone call is always an ask. Nobody can be made to pick up, so a voice rule offers “ask” or “straight to voicemail” and never “assign”. When several people are asked, you choose whether they ring all at once or one at a time. One at a time stacks up, so four people at 20 seconds each means the caller hears 80 seconds of ringing before it gives up. The rule editor shows you that number as you set it. An offered conversation belongs to nobody until someone replies. The first reply claims it, and a claim never takes it away from a colleague who got there first. An on-call schedule is the option to reach for when the rota is a property of your team rather than of one channel: it hands off on a schedule, anyone can book cover, and every rule pointing at it follows along. Outside its coverage hours it names nobody, so the rule is skipped and the next one takes over.

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Availability gates

Three optional gates decide whether a candidate is a valid answer. They apply to whichever action the rule uses.
A teammate counts as online while they have Custral open and have not set themselves Away from the account menu at the bottom of the sidebar. Presence is a heartbeat, so signing out takes effect immediately and closing a laptop takes effect within about a minute; Away takes effect at once and leaves them signed in.
Skips anyone already holding that many open conversations. Their load is counted across every channel, not just this one.
Skills are free-form tags on a member: spanish, billing, tier-2. Set them on Settings → Team → member → Skills. A rule requiring several skills only considers people who hold all of them; matching ignores capitalisation.
Gates narrow who a rule can pick; they never stop a message being delivered. If a rule’s whole rota is offline or at capacity, Custral moves on to the next rule and finally to the channel’s default assignee.

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Seeing what your rules actually do

The Routing Rules panel shows, for the last 30 days:
  • how many messages each rule assigned, and to whom (hover the count),
  • how many were routed by a rule at all versus falling back to the default,
  • how many fell back because nobody was available, the number to watch if a rule looks dead.
A rule reading “No assignments in 30 days” is either never matching the clock or always gated out, and the fallback line tells you which.

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Using it

1

Open the channel

Go to Settings → Channels and open the channel you want to route.
2

Add a rule

Choose Add Rule, name it after the shift or audience it covers, and set the days, times, or date range it applies to.
3

Pick who receives the work

Choose an action and its target: one person, a team, a rota, or least busy.
4

Set availability, if it matters

Require online agents, cap open conversations, or require skills. Leave them off for a rule that should always apply.
5

Order the rules

Use the arrows to put the most specific rule first. Add a catch-all last if you want a default other than the channel’s owner.

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Troubleshooting

Check the rule is enabled, and that its conditions match the moment mail actually arrives. Times are evaluated in the workspace timezone, not the reader’s. The panel’s summary line tells you how many messages fell back to the default.
Either its conditions never match, or its gates never pass. If the fallback line reports messages that fell back “because nobody was available”, the gates are the cause. Loosen the online requirement or raise the cap.
Skills have to be set on the member, not on the rule alone. Open Settings → Team → member → Skills and confirm the tag is there; a rule requiring two skills needs both on the same person.
Rotation skips anyone gated out, so an agent who is often offline or at capacity receives less. Hover a rule’s assignment count to see the split per person.
Members who are no longer in the workspace are ignored, and the rule falls through as though it named nobody. Edit the rule to name a current member.

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Next steps

  • Chat Routing: how routing applies to the widget.
  • Sending Pools: the outbound counterpart: which number sends, rather than who receives.
  • On-call: shifts, cover, and who is on right now.
  • Inbox Overview: where routed messages land.