Ability for admins to logout agents

Hi Katrin, 

Thank you for writing in. I am curious to know why would you wish to have admin log out agents from chat?

Thanks,

Prakruti

We would love this feature as well. If the agent is not in seat, or forgot to log off, we should be able to change their status to away/invisible. Since we have automatic assignment, this will help a lot.

Hi Aswin,

Have you explored Automatic Idle in Settings>Account>Chat Routing? This should set your agent to Away or Invisible if they miss specified number of chats. 

To enable automatic idle status

1. Go to Settings > Account > Chat Routing tab.
2. Next to Automatic Idle, select On.
3. Enter a value in the Chats Reassigned field.

   

4. Select a status option next to Idle Status.

   

5. Click Save Changes.

This should work well with your automatic assignment. 

-Prakruti

Hi Prakruti - Thank you for your response. I'm aware of this feature, however we don't want to miss those chats and that will be bad experience. Moreover, if the agents miss a chat by mistake, they wouldn't notice they are on invisible/away and need to change Online. This is just a huge inconvenience. Having this status change option from the Admin side is a lot easier, and we (Admin/Sup) can do it when we are sure that the agent is not in seat. Please consider having this option as a feature in future releases.

Hi Prakruti,

I entirely agree with Aswin. Having missed chats is a very bad user experience.

Moreover, we work with multiple departments. I have to take every department out manually and remember to put them in later again, resp. I have to deactivate the user and then reactivate him again. This is a very annoying work around which easily leads to errors. 

Before becoming a Zendesk user, I was using a different chat provider with a different CRM - there I had this option to log off users easily and also manually switch around departments. Very important for real time management. Would be great if you guys would consider this kind of feature. Thanks!

Hi Katrin and Aswin,

I would suggest using Reassignment along with Automatic Idle to ensure that the missed chat are re-assigned to other online agents. 

Other option would be to have your agents use and set a time for Settings>Personal>Idle Timeout. This would set your agent to away after specified minutes of inactivity.

The agent would be marked online as soon as there is activity on the dashboard. 

Regarding switching departments, on what basis do you switch agents' departments? You could try exploring our APIs to change agent department in real - time.

Thanks,

Prakruti 

I don't understand how a Product Manager does not see the need for this feature.

Yes, all that Prakruti says is totally true and all is possible, but all involve MISSING or potentially missing a chat first. The idle option has a huge potential of missing a chat. The reason I've come across this thread is that I want to log out an agent right now as she's stepped away for lunch 3 minutes ago. Setting the idle timeout would not kick in for at least another few minutes (realistically seen; you probably want to set this to 5> minutes) and in that time customer chats may be assigned to her.

Also, Zendesk apparently did see the need for a similar functionality in Talk, because there it is available. 

Anyway, I'm with the requestors of this feature here and do think it is needed despite all the workarounds offered by Prakruti.

Sometimes Zendesk really disappoints me. But, it's never really the product, it's always their employees.

This is an obviously needed feature that most of your competitors have (in the chat space). For instance, here's how you do it in LiveChat - https://www.livechatinc.com/blog/quick-tip-remotely-change-operators-status/.

We really need this feature, and I'm shocked that this issue was marked as Answered despite the fact that the "Product Manager" didn't seem to address the issue at all.

How can we actually get feedback to Zendesk about needed features?

Hey Gene- 

Sorry to hear that you're frustrated; this does seem like an important feature for chat. 

The "Answered" flag was added after the first response to indicate that an answer had been provided via the workarounds that Parkuti provided. In the Chat Community, the PMs mark any thread that has been offered a solution as "answered." However, the thread remains open for comments, and the Product Managers continue to monitor it for up votes and more details of use cases. "Answered" was not meant to imply "Developed." 

The Product Managers have a number of factors they must take into account when deciding which feature to develop, and the decision is influenced in part by user requests.

Often, Product Managers will ask for specific use cases or more details so that they can understand the scope and application of the problem, as Parkuti did above, and make sure that, if and when they are able to develop something that solves the problem, it does so in the best and most comprehensive way possible. These details also help them to build their case for why a particular feature should be developed. 

Threads like this one in the Product Feedback forum are the best way to let the PMs know what you're looking for; this is where they come to look for issues that effect a large number of customers, common requests that are made by a significant number of users, and other trends. While they can't respond to every post, you can rest assured that they do read them and take them into account.

We really appreciate your feedback and participation. Please continue to share details of your use case so that our teams can better understand the depth and breadth of the need. 

We need this feature because we have weekly team meetings mid-day. It would be much easier for me to be able to log my reps out, rather than having to remind them or chase them down if they forget to go invisible.

Since the department hours setting does not allow for gaps mid-day I cannot use this. The system we switched from to go with ZD Chat had this ability. 

The amount of control admins DONT have with this chat is astounding, especially around settings in the personal profile.

Hi Todd,

Operating hours does support gaps, it just requires creating multiple schedules for the same department. Here is a post going into the details: https://chat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/221845068/comments/225265808

-Ramin

How about you start considering "convenience" and "control"?

I had one of my agent went to loo while being in "Away" status and his system is locked. All of us were rushing to a meeting and chats were continuously flowing and getting abandoned, and I cannot open his computer and change it to Invisible or logout. We are high traffic handlers and cannot afford to have abandoned chats and I cannot run into everyone's desk and ask them to logout.

I, as an Admin, felt handicapped as I was not able to force logout an agent from my team. What if one of my agent is in other side of the world? Why this simple thing is so hard for you guys to at least "consider" working on? Sorry for all the rant, but this is just annoying how all the feature requests were handled with a bleak scripted response.

I agree, this is a must feature. Automatic idle feature would affect the agents stats as well, Having to explain to the manager why he dropped so many chats after going to the WC, meetings etc. I have used quite a few chat programs but this is the first I have seen that does not have this feature built-in.

Another vote for this feature.  We are a small 3 man team.  It's late at night now, way past our operating hours, and I have a user logged in, I'd like to set him to invisible :(

Hi,

I too would like to up vote this option. I work with a large team which is currently split between two countries where we overlap coverage for a few hours per day. When the agent's from our other office leave for the day, if someone leaves their chat logged in, there isn't the option of running over to their desk to simply turn it off. We instead have to monitor the dashboard religiously to ensure that none of our chats get assigned to them, and grab them if they do. Having the ability as an admin to control this would be immensely helpful.

I too want this option. It is absurd for our clients chats to be missed all the time just coz the agent is away from desk and they 'forgot' to set status to away. 

Agreed! Managing a team, there will always be someone who mistakenly leaves their desk without going idle. We need to be able to kick people out if they forget to do that. Even turning off the chat ability via our enterprise license does not work. Ridiculous. 

I agree with Jeremy. Here's a true-life example of why we need this.

A few weeks ago my company had an all-department meeting mid-day which was several floors down in our building. My team left before I did and I noticed a few did not go invisible on the chat. Since I could not log them out or change their status, I had to tell them when I got down there that they did not go invisible. As a result, they had to come back upstairs, log into their machines, change their status, head back downstairs and missed the opening of the meeting.

Had I been able to simply log them out, all of that time would not have been wasted. 

I simply don't understand how a company that develops software for customer service refuses to listen to its customer base who knows best in these practices!

I too would like to vote for this feature. Clearly it is needed. Not breaching SLAS and not missing chats are very important for all ZenDesk users. It should not be that difficult to implement this feature, especially as you have the same facility already operational on Talk.

Can I vote for this too please. We have a relatively low volume of chat at the moment so this is not a regular part of day. It is easy for an agent to forget to logout and we do not get the volume of missed chats to force an agent out.

I do not want to give the wrong impression that chat is available when in reality it is not as all the agents should be out.

Another one who would like to see this implemented. We can change users status for talk, so why not have this in chat? I have staff in two offices away from mine, so I need to have the ability to change their statuses from where I am located. I find my self doing this at least twice a day with phones, however, I am left with no options for chat.

Hi, what you can do if you really need to logout a user is to disabled Zendesk Chat on that agent, in a few seconds that will logout the agent inside Zendesk Chat (Zopim).

But there would be better/nicer way to manage online/offline status just like we have in Zendesk Talk.

Hi there, I agree this would be great to have,

It's time you add this. Stop dawdling Zendesk. 
An admin should have the option to logout agents.

It's so frustrating that Zendesk is least bothered to at least consider this in their roadmap. Automatic idle is not a solution as the chats will still get abandoned unnecessarily. Now that we have 2 sites handling chats (US and India), and if an agent forgot to sign out, I guess Zendesk expects me to travel halfway across the world and remind the agent to log out. It's a MUST needed feature for a Chat Admin. Dear Zendesk, PLEASE see this from your customers' perspective as well!

Yours Frustrated,
Aswin Kannan.

Fully agree with OP! Most, if not all, chat competitors offer this. This is a gap in functionality that needs to be filled.

Real life example of why this is needed: we have two sites serving chats. One site lost internet, but they were still getting served chats, even though the loss of internet left the agents unable to work them. If we would have turned on Automatic Idle we would have risked bumping off agents at the one fully operational site, a risk we couldn't take since they were taking such a high volume of chats with the other site down and every agent's availability was crucial. As an admin, I should have been able to log out the agents who lost internet and save the customer experience for these incoming chatters, but alas, I was helpless because this functionality still doesn't exist one year after being requested here.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, Mike. That kind of information is helpful. 

To speak to your last comment, longevity of a request isn't one of the primary factors in determining which features or functionality to develop. Product decisions are made by a combination of many factors, including the number of customers impacted, the scope of the impact to the business, alignment with market factors and our corporate goals, and resource availability, to name a few. The Zendesk Communities are also just one of several sources for obtaining customer feedback. 

We do appreciate hearing from you, and will update this thread if and when this functionality is green lit for development. 

My team is considering to switching to Zendesk Chat but during my initial review of the product this was one of the two reasons we did not switch. Its unfortunate to see that the change hasn't been made yet. It would make ZD Chat a much stronger competitor with our current system, LiveChat. 

As Zendesk knows and does studies on, having stellar customer experience is vital for success. Being bopped around from agent to agent would make for a terrible customer experience. Zendesk Talk currently allows for agents to be logged out remotely, I don't fully understand why this feature is not available in chat as well.