Agent collision happens when two or more agents respond to the same conversation simultaneously , sending conflicting replies, duplicating effort, or confusing the customer. This guide explains how Inquirly prevents it and how your team should handle unassigned conversations.
What Is Agent Collision?
Agent collision occurs when multiple support agents interact with the same conversation at the same time without coordinating. The typical consequences are:
- The customer receives two different replies, possibly with conflicting information
- Agents waste time working on a conversation someone else is already handling
- The conversation history becomes harder to read and audit
The root cause is almost always the same: a conversation is visible to the whole team but not clearly owned by any one agent.
How Inquirly Prevents Agent Collision
Inquirly uses two mechanisms to prevent collision: conversation assignment and real-time typing indicators.
Conversation assignment
Every conversation can be assigned to a specific agent. Once assigned, ownership is visible to the whole team , everyone knows who is responsible, and other agents know not to respond.
Agents can assign conversations in two ways:
Assign to yourself , when you open an unassigned conversation, Inquirly displays a banner at the top of the thread:
“This conversation is not assigned to you. Would you like to assign this conversation to yourself?”
Click Assign to me to take ownership immediately. This is the fastest way to claim a conversation from the queue and signal to the rest of the team that it is being handled.
Assign to another agent , use the Assigned Agent field in the right-side Conversation Actions panel to assign the conversation to a specific teammate.
Once a conversation is assigned, the assignee indicator appears in the conversation list so the team can see ownership at a glance without opening the thread.
Typing indicators
When an agent starts typing a reply in a conversation, Inquirly shows a real-time typing indicator to any other agent who has the same conversation open. This prevents two agents from composing replies simultaneously without knowing the other is already responding.
If you see a typing indicator when you open a conversation, another agent is already working on a reply. Wait for them to send, or coordinate via a Private Note before adding your own response.
Best Practices for Teams
Claim conversations before replying. Make it a team habit to assign a conversation to yourself before composing a response. The “Assign to me” banner makes this a single click.
Use the Unassigned tab to manage unclaimed conversations. The Unassigned view in the conversation list shows all threads not yet owned by any agent. During busy periods, have agents regularly check this view and claim conversations proactively.
Use Private Notes to coordinate mid-conversation. If you need to flag something to a teammate about an open conversation (without the customer seeing it ) use a Private Note with an @mention. This keeps coordination inside the thread where it is visible to the whole team.
Set up round-robin assignment for high-volume inboxes. If your team handles a large volume of conversations, manual claiming may not be fast enough. Use round-robin assignment rules to automatically distribute incoming conversations evenly across available agents.
