What is it?
You can now add a short delay before Skill-based Routing runs its first assignment. This gives HubSpot a little more time to finish loading important ticket details — such as associations, metadata, or detected attributes — before your routing rules evaluate the ticket.
This setting appears at the bottom of every Skill-based Routing ruleset as “Delay before first assignment.” You can choose anywhere from 0 to 10 minutes, depending on how much time your workflows need.
This helps improve assignment accuracy and gives you more control over when routing happens.
Why does it matter?
In many teams, important ticket information becomes available shortly after the ticket is created. This includes things like:
- Ticket associations
- CRM data syncing
- Property values set by inbox automation or integrations
- Language or region detection
- Skill-related attributes
When routing fires before these details are ready, Skill-based Routing may not have the full context — which can lead to early or incorrect assignments, and ultimately more reassignment downstream.
Adding a short delay helps Skill-based Routing evaluate your rules with a more complete picture of the ticket.
This means:
- More accurate first assignments
- Fewer tickets bouncing between owners
- Better performance of skill-based rules
- More predictable routing behavior across Email, Forms, and other channels
- Flexibility for each team to tune this based on their needs
Most teams will benefit from a small delay (1–3 minutes), but you can choose the timing that works best for your team.
How does it work?
- Configure the delay in each Skill-based Routing ruleset. At the bottom of your ruleset, select “Delay before first assignment” and choose a time from 0–10 minutes.
- Skill-based Routing waits before running the first evaluation. The delay is applied before the evaluation of a ticket and is intended to give ticket data time to finish loading before your rules run. After the delay, routing continues as normal.
- Assignments will happen after the delay you choose. If you select a delay, you may briefly see tickets sit unassigned before Skill-based Routing assigns them. This is expected.
Additional notes
- All customers with Skill-based Routing can use this setting.
- If your team relies heavily on early manual triage, you may want a shorter delay.
- If your team uses integrations or enrichment that takes a bit longer, consider a 2–3 minute delay.
- Delays above 5 minutes should be used thoughtfully, as they increase the amount of time tickets remain unassigned.
- The delay applies at the ruleset level — not to individual rules.
Who gets it?
Service Hub Enterprise