Assign Owner: Users, Teams, Related Records & Live-User Routing

What this does#

The Assign Owner action decides who becomes the owner of a record when a workflow runs. Instead of assigning leads and deals by hand, you can hand them to a specific person, spread them evenly across a team, hand them to whoever is actually online right now, or even set the owner of a related record. It keeps work moving to the right person automatically and fairly.

ℹ️

The owner is the user responsible for a record. Ownership controls who sees it in “my records”, who gets notified, and who the follow-up tasks belong to.

Step 1 — Add the Assign Owner action#

Open your workflow in the builder, drag the Assign Owner action onto the canvas, and click it to open the Configure Node panel on the right.

Step 2 — Choose which record to assign#

The Record to assign dropdown decides whose owner you’re setting:

The trigger record (for example, Deals) — set the owner of the record that started the workflow.
A related record (for example, Contacts (via Contact Name)) — reach through a lookup and set the owner of the linked record instead.

✅

Setting the owner of a related record is handy when you want, say, a new Deal to make sure its linked Contact is owned by the same rep — no second workflow needed.

Step 3 — Pick an Assignment Type#

This is the heart of the action — how the new owner is chosen:

Specific User — always the same person.
Multiple Users (Round Robin) — rotate evenly across a hand-picked list of users.
Role (Round Robin) / Profile (Round Robin) — rotate across everyone who has that role or profile.
Team (Round Robin) — rotate across the members of a team (see Step 4).
Copy from a user field — use whoever is already named in a user field on the record.

ℹ️

Round robin means each new record goes to the next person in line, so work is shared out evenly instead of piling onto one person.

Step 4 — Team assignment: pick the team#

If you chose Team (Round Robin), a Select Team dropdown appears — pick the team (for example, Sales Team) and new records will rotate across its members.

Step 5 — Assign only to online users (live routing)#

Turn on Assign only to online users to route each record to a team member who is currently available. This uses live voice (softphone) presence — so only reps who are signed in and online are considered.

The Assign Owner action set to a related record (Contacts via Contact Name), Team (Round Robin) → Sales Team, with “Assign only to online users” switched on.

💡

Live routing needs reps to be signed in to the softphone. If no one is online, the assignment is skipped — so keep a fallback (see the note at the end).

Step 6 — Notifications and handover#

Two optional finishing touches:

Send email notification to the new owner — lets the person know a record just landed with them.
Transfer the previous owner’s open records — move that record’s open Tasks, Meetings, and Calls over to the new owner so nothing is left behind.

A worked example#

Goal: every new Deal should go to an available member of the Sales Team.

Trigger: Deal — Record Created
Action: Assign Owner → Assignment Type Team (Round Robin) → Team Sales Team
Assign only to online users: on — so the Deal goes to a rep who can pick up the phone now

⚠️

With Assign only to online users on, records are skipped when nobody is online. If that’s a risk, add an If / Else branch (or a second Assign Owner step) that falls back to the whole team without the online filter.

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