When several people answer one WhatsApp number, the first question about every new chat is "whose is this?". Without an answer, the fastest person takes everything, the quiet ones take nothing, and the chat that arrives at 12:58 is nobody’s.
Rotation answers the question the moment the chat arrives. Every teammate has a label with their name on it, and each new incoming conversation receives the next person’s label, in turn. It is a small mechanism, deliberately: it labels, it does not lock, and the rest of this page is exact about both halves.
What rotation does
Everyone who can reply in the inbox, the owner and every teammate it is shared with, has a label carrying their own name, for example "Dana Levi". The label is created automatically when a teammate accepts their invitation. With rotation switched on, each new incoming one-to-one chat is given the name label of the next person in the rotation, and the turn moves on.
Only genuinely new incoming conversations are labelled. Group chats are left alone, and so are conversations your team started, because a chat you opened already has someone behind it. A conversation that already carries a name label is not labelled again, and a chat can still be given a second name label by hand when two people share it.
Because the result is an ordinary label, everything that works with labels works with rotation: the chat list can be filtered to "mine", a saved filter can show one person’s chats, and the label is visible on the conversation for everyone.
- Applies to new incoming one-to-one chats only.
- Groups and conversations your team started are never labelled by rotation.
- One pick per chat, made once, in the order you set.
- The label is a normal label: filter by it, search by it, add or remove it by hand.
Setting it up
- 1
Share the inbox with your team
Each teammate gets their name label when they accept the invitation. Nothing to create by hand.
- 2
Open Labels, then the Rotation tab
Only managers, meaning members with Full Control, can change the rotation. Everyone else can see it.
- 3
Turn on the people who should take chats
Each row is a teammate. Switch on the ones who take new conversations and leave the rest off.
- 4
Put them in order
Drag the rows on a computer, or use the up and down buttons on a phone.
- 5
Set weights, hours and pauses where you need them
All optional, all per person. The next section explains each.
- 6
Switch rotation on
From that moment each new incoming chat receives the next person’s label. The tab shows who gets the next chat, when the last one was labelled, and how many people are taking chats.
The controls for each person
A plain "everyone in turn" rotation is fair only when everyone works the same hours and carries the same load. Four controls handle the cases where they do not.
| Control | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Order | The sequence the turn moves through | Dana, then Yossi, then Noa, then back to Dana |
| Weight, 1 to 20 | A person at weight 2 receives twice as many new chats as a person at weight 1 | A full-timer at 2 beside a part-timer at 1 |
| Pause until a date | The person is skipped until that date and then returns automatically | Holiday until the 1st: no chats until then, no one has to remember to switch them back on |
| Off | Out of the rotation until someone turns them back on | A manager who only covers emergencies |
| Work hours | Days and hours in that person’s own time zone; outside them they are skipped while someone else is on shift | Dana 9 to 5 in London, Noa 9 to 5 in Tel Aviv, each labelled only during their own day |
Work hours are same-day windows. A shift that runs past midnight is not supported; split it into two people’s hours or leave hours unset for that person.
If nobody is on shift when a chat arrives, it still goes to the next enabled, unpaused person rather than to nobody. A chat at 2 a.m. wakes no one up, but it has a name on it in the morning.
Who cannot take chats, and why the row says so
Some teammates cannot be switched on, and the Rotation tab tells you why on the row itself instead of failing silently.
- A teammate with view-only access cannot take chats, because they cannot reply. Change their role to let them.
- A teammate who has no access to the inbox, or who has left, is not eligible. When someone’s access is removed they drop out of the rotation on their own, and their label stays on the chats they already had.
- A name label that has been turned into a pipeline stage, or placed in a group of mutually exclusive labels, cannot be used for rotation. Pick another label or take it out of the group.
- Two teammates with the same name get distinct labels, the second one numbered, for example "David Cohen (2)". The tab asks you to rename it to something clearer.
What rotation deliberately does not do
Rotation is a labelling rule. Knowing where it stops is what lets you build a process on it.
- It does not make anyone the owner of a conversation. There is no owner or assignee field; there is a label with a name on it.
- It does not change who can see a chat. Everyone who could open the conversation before still can. A teammate with limited access can even be given the label for a chat they cannot open, so if you limit what people see, share each person a filter on their own name label.
- It does not lock a chat. Anyone with access can still reply, and Spun’s live "replying" indicator is what stops two people answering at once.
- It does not balance by workload. It counts turns and weights, not how many open chats a person has or how busy they are.
- It does not route by topic or skill. Every new chat goes to the next person, whatever it is about.
- It does not label groups or conversations your team starts.
Related: See who is handling what, live
Working with the labels day to day
The point of a name on every chat is that each person can open the inbox and see their own queue. A saved filter on your own name label gives you exactly that, and a manager can keep one filter per teammate to see how each queue looks.
Pair it with a first-response target and the picture is complete: rotation says whose chat it is, the target’s live countdown says how long it has been waiting, and the team leaderboard shows afterwards how quickly each person answered. When a chat needs to change hands, add the other person’s name label or swap it; nothing else has to change.
If nobody can take chats, or rotation is switched off, new chats simply arrive without a name label, as they did before. Nothing queues up and nothing is lost.