Auto assignment of live chats and email tickets to agents
Auto assignment of live chats vs email tickets
| Live chats | Email tickets |
|---|---|
| Auto assignment logic is enabled by default. | Auto assignment logic is enabled by default. |
| Auto assignment cannot be disabled. Chats can be assigned to a specific agents by using sticky agent functionality, follow these steps. | Auto-assignment of email tickets can be restricted (enabled/disabled) as per industry needs, follow these steps. When Auto-assignment setting is disabled, all the tickets created will be in Open status and must be manually assigned to the agents. |
Auto-assignment logic
The auto-assignment feature automates the assignment of incoming live chats/email tickets based on agent's capacity, availability, and expertise.
Three parameters dictate the live chat/email ticket assignment logic based on which the live chats/email tickets will get assigned to the available agents, they are listed below:
- Agent availability
An agent within Inbox can be in any of the following statuses - Available, Busy, or Away.
- If the agent is on Available status, they will be automatically assigned new incoming chats/emails.
- If the agent is either Busy or Away, they’ll be not actively assigned to new chats/emails. That chat/email will either be assigned to the next available agent or queued.
Click here, to know more about the difference between Busy and Away.
- Last live chat/email ticket assigned time
This presents the timestamp at which the agent was last assigned with a live chat/email ticket i.e the longest duration each agent has gone without getting a new chat request/email ticket.
- Concurrency
Each agent will have an upper limit for chats called Concurrency which explains the maximum number of concurrent live chats/email tickets that the agent can be assigned, at any time.
- When a new live chat/email ticket is raised (assuming it is raised within working hours), it will first fetch all the available agents in the group the live chat/email ticket was raised for. It will not consider agents who have set their status to Busy or Away.
- All the available agents will be sorted in the ascending order of their last live chat/email ticket assigned time i.e the longest an agent has gone without getting a new live chat/email ticket. Then the live chat/email ticket will be assigned to the first agent who has available space in their concurrency.
Sticky agent for live chats
The other type of assignment which does not consider any of the above parameters is Sticky agent.
- Sticky agent is a type of live chat assignment where the customers can connect to an agent, of their choice (agents they are familiar with/ have conversed with before).
- Sticky agent feature is useful in Industries where the customer and agent relationship is crucial.
Understand Auto-assignment with an example
Assume
A live chat request was raised at 10:00 AM
At that instant, the agents have the following availability & concurrency settings.
Agent A = Status - Available
Agent B = Status - Busy
Agent C = Status - Available
Agent D = Status - Away
Agent E = Status - Available
From the above agent list, only consider agents who are under available status.
Agent A
Agent C
Agent E
Then, they will be rearranged based on descending order of the last live chat/email ticket assigned time,
Agent C = The last live chat/email ticket assigned was 30 mins before & Concurrency - 3/6
Agent A = the last live chat/email ticket assigned was 15 mins before & Concurrency - 4/6
Agent E = the last live chat/email ticket assigned was 10 mins before & Concurrency - 6/6
The live chat/email ticket will be assigned to Agent C, since C is the first agent who is not assigned a new chat/email ticket for the longest time and has space in their concurrency (3 more left to their max concurrency which is 6).
Tickets and chats can be manually assigned to an agent regardless of the auto-assignment logic. :