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An account owner is the teammate who owns a customer. One contact has one owner, or none. The owner does two things:
  • Kai shows the owner on the contact profile and beside the conversation, so every teammate knows who holds the relationship.
  • Kai assigns a new conversation from that customer to the owner.

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What happens to a new conversation

When a customer writes, Kai finds their contact. If the contact has an owner, Kai assigns the conversation to that person. If the contact has no owner, the conversation goes to the shared queue, as before. If the owner is no longer a member of the workspace, the contact loses its owner, and the conversation goes to the shared queue. Kai does not hold a conversation for a person who left.

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What happens to an open conversation

Kai assigns a conversation one time, while it is unassigned. Ownership sets the owner of new work. It does not take a conversation back from the teammate that a manager gave it to. There are two ways to move the open conversations as well:
  • In Kai, a manager sets the owner on the contact profile. The open conversations of that customer move to the new owner.
  • Through the API, send reassign_open_conversations: true.
Through the API the default is false. A nightly job that repeats 4000 unchanged assignments must not move every live conversation each night.
Closed conversations and archived conversations never move. They are history, and history records who answered.

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Set an owner

You can name the owner by member id or by email address. To find the member ids of your workspace, send GET /members. To clear the owner, send DELETE /contacts/{id}/owner, or set "owner": null in a contact write.

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Permissions in Kai

In Kai, a teammate with the Agent role reads and edits contacts, because the person who talks to a customer is the person who learns their details. Only an owner, an admin or a manager sets the account owner. That decision routes work between teammates. An API key needs contacts:write for both.