Contact owners

Every contact can have an owner: the teammate responsible for that customer. Teammates claim and assign contacts themselves from All Contacts, the Watchlists and the contact drawer. This page decides what happens when nobody picks.

Open the Contact owners page

Go to Settings → Organization → Contact owners. Admins and owners can change the settings; members can see them.

Assign owners automatically

Pick one of three modes:

• Manual — teammates claim and assign contacts themselves. Nothing is assigned automatically.
• First reply — the first teammate to reply to a contact with no owner, from the inbox, becomes its owner. Replies sent through the API or by automations don't count, and a contact that already has an owner keeps it.
• Round robin — each new contact is given to the next teammate in rotation: whoever has waited longest since round robin last gave them a contact. This covers contacts created by a new conversation, from the Contacts page, through the public API or MCP, and by a workflow's Create Contact step. Imported contacts, contacts synced from Shopify or your WhatsApp address book, and merges are not dealt out.
  • Tick Skip teammates who are Away or Busy to leave anyone set to Away or Busy out of the turn. Otherwise everyone in rotation takes turns, because a contact's owner is long-lived.

Blocked contacts are never given an owner automatically.

Release inactive owners

Turn on Release owners after a quiet spell and choose a number of days (1 to 365, 30 to start). A contact goes back to Unclaimed when both are true:

• its current owner has had it for at least that many days, and
• it has had no conversation activity — no message from the customer or your team — for that many days.

Cloodot checks every 10 minutes. A contact that was claimed or messaged in the meantime keeps its owner. Releases are recorded in the contact's owner history, and they don't start workflows.

Teammates in rotation

The roster lists every teammate with their status, how many contacts they own, and whether they are In rotation. Round robin only gives contacts to teammates in rotation. This is the same list Auto-assignment uses for conversations, so switching someone off here takes them out of both. Each switch saves as soon as you flip it; on Auto-assignment the same list saves with its Save button.

The header shows how many contacts in your workspace have an owner and how many are unclaimed.

Send returning customers to their owner

To route a returning customer's conversation to their contact owner, turn on Send returning customers to their contact owner on the Auto-assignment page.

Who owns what

• When a teammate is removed from the workspace, the contacts they owned go back to Unclaimed.
• Every owner change — claimed, assigned, first reply, round robin, merged or released — is recorded with who made it and when. The contact drawer shows the latest one under the owner.
• Workflows can react with the Contact Owner Changed trigger and assign owners with the Assign Contact Owner action. See Triggers and Actions.
• Changes to these settings appear in the Audit Log.