Mike Martello

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.

Simon's method is a great hack, but it gets problematic if you have more than one update via the API hitting a ticket in a submission. This feature is very much needed!