Unified agent status is part of omnichannel routing and provides a way for agents to control availability for Support, Talk, and Messaging from a single menu. In addition to the standard unified agent statuses available on all plans, admins on Professional plans and above can also define custom unified agent statuses to suit their workflows.
Unified agent statuses are automatically available to accounts that meet the requirements.
About the standard unified agent statuses
Unified agent statuses are used to inform omnichannel routing behavior for tickets from Support, Messaging, and Talk. Agents set their unified status manually and need to adjust it throughout the day to accurately reflect their availability to receive work.
There are four standard agent statuses:
- Online - Tickets from Talk, Messaging, and Support can be routed to the agent.
- Away - Only Support tickets can be routed to the agent.
- Transfer only - Only tickets that have already been reviewed and need to be transferred to the agent can be routed to them.
- Offline - No tickets can be routed to the agent.
Modifying an agent's status
In most situations, an agent's status is set manually by the agents themselves. They are encouraged to change their status to offline before any breaks. However, an agent's status is automatically set to offline or away, as defined by an admin, when one of the following events is detected:
- An agent closes the Agent Workspace without signing out (by shutting down their computer, closing their browser window, or putting their computer in sleep mode)
- An agent’s connection is lost due to a network outage
- An agent is idle for longer than the idle status threshold defined by admins
Requirements and limitations of unified agent status
Consider the following requirements and limitations before enabling and using omnichannel routing and unified agent status.
Requirements
- The Agent Workspace must be activated for your account.
- If your account has a Chat subscription, native messaging or Sunshine Conversations must also be activated.
- You can't be using live chat.
Limitations
The following limitations currently exist for unified agent status in omnichannel routing:
- Operating hours won't set an agent's status.
- After you turn on omnichannel routing, you can no longer set a Talk agent status from the Talk dashboard, mobile apps, or Talk APIs. Integrations that use Talk APIs to change agent statuses might also be impacted.
- Explore dashboards will show per channel agent statuses but not unified custom statuses yet. This will be supported in later releases.
- If call forwarding is enabled and the status of an agent is automatically set to offline because the agent has been disconnected, calls to the agent will no longer be forwarded to the agent's phone.
- When omnichannel routing is activated, agents are automatically set to offline across all channels. When this happens, they are prompted to set a new status. Ongoing live conversations aren't interrupted, but calls waiting in the queue will be directed to voicemail.
- Based on your plan, there are limits to the number of custom agent
statuses you can create:
- Team and Growth: You cannot create custom statuses
- Professional: 5 custom statuses
- Enterprise: 100 custom statuses
Related articles
See the following articles for more information to help you get up and running with unified agent statuses:
6 Comments
The definition of "away" in this article is different from what is shown in-product, and is pretty confusing.
In the product it's defined as "Can't receive work, but work is added to the queue." That's very different from "Only Support tickets can be routed to the agent." I assume the version in the product is the correct one. Am I right about that?
Hi Zachary,
The difference between the typical Away status before in Agent Workspace before Unified Agent Status, only applied to Live Messaging/Chat conversations. And while in Away status, agents could only work on tickets they were previously assigned and or Help Center/ Web Form and Email tickets. But were no longer routed Live Messaging/Chat conversation tickets. And instead they are added to a Live conversation queue for Online agents to work from.
The new Away status in Unified Agent Status applies to being Away in Messaging/Chat and Talk tickets. That leaves Email and Help Center/Web Form which can still be worked or routed because they do not require an immediate response. And those Live Messaging/Chat conversations will still be added to a queue for Online agents to work from. I hope that helps
I also find it confusing and it would be better served by some renaming. Examples that need work, but the idea: Online to Online - All channels and Away to Online - Support/Email tickets.
The article says:
Which one is it? Offline? Away? They're 2 different statuses. There are 3 scenarios, so which status applies to which scenario?
Hi,
would it be possible to set a manual reason?
Like: "AdHoc" selection, then Agent need type in doing step?
Thanks.
Tobias
Shaun Luong Good point. There is an admin setting in the Routing configuration that enables them to choose whether the agent status is changed to offline or away. I've updated the article to clarify this.
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