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Ability for admins to logout agents



Posted Mar 01, 2017

It would be great to have some kind of management feature/panel that allows admins to log out agents from chat. This same panel could for instance be used to switch around agents from one to another department.


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66 comments

With that being said, I did see Jonathan Herlin's comment earlier about disabling that agent's chat capability to log them out. Will this have any affect on data or anything else? If not that could be a decent workaround. 

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Jonathan's suggestion is still the only work around we have been able to use to compensate for the poor design. Unfortunately, the agent and their chats do not show up on the agent report page when they are disabled. Adding them back does add the data back, but it skews the overall numbers until that is done. We have also run into issues with the agent being locked out of accessing it for up to a day after we add them back if we are close to our seat limit. 

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Can anyone confirm if this feature has been considered for development? It's been over an year since the feature was originally requested.

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image avatar

Ramin Shokrizadeh

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Kabir,

We are exploring some solutions for this problem this year but don't have anything to share right now. When we have something to share, we will update the thread here.

Thanks,

Ramin

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I am voting for the suggestion for admins to log of chat agents.

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Also voting for the admins to have the ability to log agents out of chat. 

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Voting to have admins be able to log agents out of chat.

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I'm upvoting this request as well. 

We only offer chat during business hours. Outside of business hours we want articles suggested for their inquiries. 

I discovered after an agent went on vacation that they had stayed available and with a chat window open, and I couldn't fix it.

I disabled them from zendesk chat but it doesn't seem to be changing their availability.

Admins MUST be able to log a forgetful agent off immediately when a problem is found so that users aren't inconvenienced. 

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Hi Joel 

Thanks for the valuable feedback. We are planning this feature in our roadmap.

In the mean time, you can set the operating hours, which can change the agent status. Also, you can also email us to force logout an agent in vacation issues like this. 

Thanks 
Shashank

 

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Add this as another upvote for Zendesk Chat to add the Administrator ability to log-out agents please...

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Another vote from me. I have a user who has tried to log out several times, but her status remains 'Online'. She has even tried changing her password, but it didn't solve the issue. Admins need this feature to address such issues. 

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Can we please get an update from someone at Zendesk on the implementation status  & ETA of this feature?

(adding the ability for an administrator to log-out agents if needed)

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I know my organization would benefit from the ability to remote log in / out as well.

It seems like a basic 'feature' that is missing IMHO.

 

Mike

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We could really use this tool as well. Agents have so much information that they are giving/receiving that they often forget to log out or go invisible. Other users and managers need to know who is available at all times in order to provide a better customer experience. We use this tool for telephone queues as well. Very valuable.  We used Live Chat in the past and this was a basic tool. Not sure why Zopim/Zendesk hasn't incorporated it yet. They've made some great changes in the past. I hope this becomes another success story for them.

 

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We really need this, too. I can‘t have agents forget to log out and have the widget invite visitors into a chat all weekend long. Using idle timeout, chat redirects, or business hours is not an option.

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This is a totally critical feature. We're a very small business and yet I have the need for it all the time. It's SO easy to forget to log off. Every chat we miss is a major issue and none of the alternative solutions are viable

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Adding to the requesters for this feature and echoing its importance for our operations. We have the same issue where agents forget to log off. The idle time-out feature does not work for us since a lack of chats coming in for a few minutes will set an agent to idle when they are actually available. Administrators need the ability to quickly and easily change agent chat status.

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We need this as well. Sometimes agents forget to log-off at the end of the day/week and we need to be able to log them out without disabling them.

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While this feature would be nice. A useful workaround is to disable Chat for the agent in their Zendesk profile, then re-enable

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Yeah this sort of admin control is fundamental and should have been built into the initial design. This is surely a basic role of the Administrator?

 

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Oh my goodness. I'm genuinely surprised that this isn't a feature. Last night, an agent forgot to go offline and we were taking phone calls all night.

 

Our company. Was accepting phone calls at 2am. I'm confused, what about this isn't a huge red flag? What about this warrants the community employees to go "meh, maybe we'll add it. Maybe it'll get green lit."

 

Our salesperson oversold Zendesk to us. I am so very unsatisfied at the lackluster features. But this one takes the cake. But hey, at least we're locked in to a monthly now, right Zendesk?

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+1 here too!

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Is there any update on this?

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We found a few ways to bypass this. I didn't like the option above to log them out after a certain amount of missed chats so we found 2 ways to help ensure no one stays logged on when not around. 

Option 1: first line of defense

In the idle timeout settings under chat settings, agents can make it so after a certain amount of minutes of inactivity zen will make them go offline. I feel like we still needed another line of defense. I just discovered this setting yesterday and one of my agents left before we could change his settings, and you guessed it he didn't log off chat. So I had a theory and after testing I was able to "log off" my online chat agent.

Option 2: removing and re-adding access

Let me start out that I have no clue if this impacts billing at all, I would imagine it doesn't and just allows you to restrict who has access to what. but I had that one agent who logged out before we could change his idle settings so to force him out I went to general zen settings-> Manage -> People and found my agents. then I toggle their Permission to chat off, which logged them out. I immediately toggled it back on to give Permission to chat again. This keeps them signed off until they log in next. Still unsure if there will be any repercussions of this, it just helped in a pinch. 

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This has been getting requested since March 1st, 2017 with over 30 up votes. Why does it take Zendesk years to actually take feedback into consideration but they have no problem continually pumping out new features that again have more feedback? This has been getting waited on for 3 years along with many other things. When can we expect project management to take this in?

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Hello,

My last company and my current company have had this same issue and would like your product to include a solution.

My current company is in the process of implementing Zendesk Chat functionality and even in our testing have run into this situation.

The use-cases have already been spelled out in the previous comments, but an Administrator should have the ability to make all users Invisible/offline at once on chat.

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@... OMG thank you. Yes, flipping the switch on their profile to take away their chat ability immediately kicks them chat. We are a small team of 3 and we cycle chat in different timezones on the world. I had no way of getting in touch with him so I was afraid every chat for over 12 hours would be "missed." But because of your keen eye, I don't have to worry about that anymore. Thank you!

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@... So glad this helped you out! It helped me tremendously with my 3 local agents who I could text... it was just easier to boot them. I cant imagine dealing with this issue with agents around the world. 

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This is a pretty dead post, but I wanted to put a comment as an example of why we would want to have this as an admin feature. 

We just closed a little bit early today for the holidays and one of our agents forgot to log out.  In Zendesk Talk, we have the option to set someone as offline.  However, in Zendesk Chat, we do not have that functionality.  Our Support Hours are currently active, but we're closing early for a day, so it does not make sense for us to change our available hours, especially if it ends up being forgotten after the long holiday.  The fact that as admins we do not have the ability to log someone off of chat when it's available in other Zendesk features seems like a HUGE feature miss. 

It's not a make or break point for many people, but it could be, as evidenced with someone who did not ultimately choose the Zendesk product earlier on in this thread due to this feature miss.  I think for me, it's all about parity with other features and the ability to log people out who forget so that our customers don't have a terrible customer experience.

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Is this still not available yet? 

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