Configure multiple markets on an Email channel
Historically, an Email channel could be pinned to exactly one market. That single market stamped every conversation the inbox received, no matter what language the customer wrote in. You can still do that — but an Email channel can now be assigned several markets at once, and Atender picks the right one per conversation based on the clues it finds in the conversation.
This is useful when one address genuinely serves more than one country — for example, a single support@yourcompany.com inbox handling both UK and US customers, or a regional inbox covering several neighboring markets in the same language family.
Before you start
- This feature applies to Email channels routed to an Agent Stack. If the channel is routed to a team instead, the Markets field is not shown — team-routed channels do not use market-based knowledge retrieval the same way.
- You need admin access to change channel settings.
- Decide up front what the channel’s Default Language should be. It matters more now than it did with a single market — see How Atender picks the market for a conversation below.
Assign multiple markets to a channel
- Go to Settings → Email and open the channel you want to configure.
- Confirm the channel’s Route is set to an Agent Stack. The Markets control only appears for agent-stack-routed channels; if you see a single Market dropdown instead, the channel is routed to a team and this feature does not apply.
- Under Markets, open the multi-select and add every market this inbox should serve. You can search by market name and pick as many as apply, up to the configured maximum per channel. If two or more of the selected markets share a language or use similar languages, a language warning appears under the Markets picker — review it before you save.
- Set (or double-check) the Default Language field for the channel. With several markets, it is only used when an email is written in that language — see below.
- If the channel has two or more markets, set up Who answers each market.
- Save the channel.
From this point on, every inbound conversation on this channel is evaluated against the full list of markets you selected, not a single fixed value.
How Atender picks the market for a conversation
The rule depends on how many markets are configured on the channel:
- One market selected. Nothing changes from the old behavior — that market stamps every conversation on the channel.
- Several markets selected. Atender works through the following clues in order and uses the first one that points to one of your selected markets:
1. The country field on a form. If the conversation comes from a form that has a country field, that country decides the market.
2. The market field from an API caller. If the conversation is created through the API and the caller supplies a market (for example, the HubSpot “country” field), that value is used.
3. A language that belongs to only one country. If the email is written in a language that maps to just one of your selected markets, that market is used.
4. The customer’s known phone number. If Atender already has a phone number for the customer, the number’s country decides the market.
5. The country ending of the email address. An address ending in
.noor.co.uk, for example, points to that country’s market. 6. The Default Language, only if the email is written in it. If the email is written in the channel’s Default Language and that language resolves to one of your selected markets, that market is used. - No clue matches. If none of the clues above points to one of your selected markets, the conversation gets no market.
- No markets selected. Behavior is unchanged from today’s flag-gated default and is outside the scope of this article.
Who answers each market
When an Agent Stack inbox has two or more markets, a Who answers each market setting appears on the channel. It lets you decide, market by market, who handles the conversation:
- The Agent Stack. The AI agents reply to conversations in that market, as they do today.
- A team. Conversations in that market go to the team you choose. A team’s market gets no AI reply.
The setting also includes a Market not known row, which needs a team as soon as any market goes to a team. Conversations that end up with no market, because none of the clues matched, go to this team.
If you save the channel with only one market, the Who answers each market setting is cleared.
Knowledge retrieval vs. routing trust
The source that decided the market matters for how much Atender trusts it downstream:
- A market chosen from a softer clue, such as the language of the email, biases knowledge retrieval toward that market’s content, but it does not carry the same trust as a channel-level market when routing decisions are made.
- A market chosen because it’s the only market on the channel, or because the Default Language resolved it, is treated as a channel-level signal and carries the same trust as the single-market setup you may already be using elsewhere — it’s used for both knowledge retrieval and routing.
In practice: the more markets you add to one inbox, the more conversations will be decided by clues in the conversation rather than by the channel, and the more it matters that your knowledge base is organized per market rather than relying on routing alone to separate them.
How this differs from single-market channels
If you’ve configured Email channels before, you’re used to the single Market dropdown described in the core email channel documentation — one inbox, one market, always. Multi-market channels are additive on top of that:
- A channel with exactly one market selected in the new Markets control behaves identically to the old single-market setup.
- A channel with several markets selected introduces the ordered market-detection step described above, which single-market channels never needed.
- Multi-market selection is only available where the channel is routed to an Agent Stack. Team-routed channels keep the original single-market experience.
If you’re not sure whether a channel needs multiple markets, start with one — you can always come back and add more later without losing your existing configuration.
Limits and notes
- There’s a cap on how many markets a single channel can carry. If you try to add more than the maximum, the multi-select won’t let you save.
- Language warnings under the Markets picker flag selected markets that share a language or use similar languages. Review them before saving.
- Saving the channel down to one market clears the Who answers each market setting.
- Removing markets down to zero, or clearing the field entirely, returns the channel to the default language-fallback behavior rather than any specific market.
- Existing channels that already had a single market configured were carried forward automatically — you’ll see that one market pre-selected in the new Markets control the first time you open the channel.