Open conversations sitting in the inbox with no agent or team assigned — the queue nobody owns yet.
At a glance
Unassigned Open Conversations counts the open threads in your Intercom inbox that no agent and no team has picked up yet. These are the conversations most at risk of being missed, because ownership is the trigger for accountability — an unassigned conversation has no one watching its clock. For Blitz, where a quick “is this in stock for Saturday?” question can convert directly into a sale, an unassigned pile is leaking revenue every minute it sits. Think of this as your “needs triage” pile: the goal during staffed hours is to keep it at or near zero.
Calculation
Vortex IQ queries the Intercomconversations search endpoint for records with state = open and filters to those where neither admin_assignee_id nor team_assignee_id resolves to an active owner. (A conversation routed to a team but not yet to an individual is treated per your profile setting — by default team-only assignment counts as assigned.) The card reports the count; the underlying list carries each conversation’s age, customer, channel, and tags so a lead can triage in priority order.
Worked example
A representative reading of Unassigned Open Conversations for Blitz. On a normal weekday the card hovers at0–1 because Intercom’s round-robin assignment routes new conversations to agents within seconds. At 12:05 it jumps to 7. The support lead checks and finds the cause: the morning shift’s two agents both went to lunch and were toggled “away”, so round-robin had no eligible recipient and parked the conversations unassigned. She manually assigns the seven across the remaining agent, replies to the two oldest herself, and adjusts the away-mode rule so the queue can’t strand again. The count returns to 0. To investigate why assignment stalled, she opens Vortex Mind; to ask “how long were those seven unassigned before pickup?” she uses Ask Viq.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: In Intercom, open Inbox and select the Unassigned view (a standard system view in most workspaces), filtered to Open. The conversation count at the top of that view is the direct equivalent of this card. You can also build a custom Inbox view filteringAssignee is Unassigned and State is Open.
Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: pair with workload and SLA cards to see whether unassigned spikes are a staffing problem or a routing-rule gap. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Q: How often does Unassigned Open Conversations update? It is real-time — re-read on each dashboard refresh. Because auto-assignment runs continuously, expect this number to bounce near zero during staffed hours and accumulate outside them. Q: Why does my Intercom Inbox show a different number? The common reasons are team-only assignment being counted differently, snoozed conversations being included in the Inbox view but excluded here, and bot-held conversations. Build a custom Inbox view withAssignee is Unassigned + State is Open for the cleanest comparison.
Q: Is a non-zero value always bad?
No. A small, transient number between assignment cycles is normal. The signal is a value that climbs and stays up — that means inbound is outrunning routing or an assignment rule has a gap (an away-mode edge case, a closed team, an unrouted channel).
Q: Can I customise the alert threshold?
Yes. The >0 trigger is configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab. Many teams set it to >3 to suppress the normal transient churn and only alert on genuine pile-ups.