Agent tags (live chat groups and queues)
Similar to adding tags to specific user profiles in your live chat CRM, you can also assign tags to human support agents on your team. Essentially, these tags are similar to live chat queues or "groups" in traditional live chat platforms.
When a new live chat session is triggered by the user, your live chat assignment skill can use these agent tags to connect the user to the most appropriate agent.
Live chat queues
Human agents can only handle a limited number of conversations simultaneously. By default, this limit is set to 4 concurrent chats, and you can change this in the “Settings – General – Live chat settings” menu.
Once this limit is reached by all agents in the group, new live chat requests will get queued and will be assigned to agents only when they close existing live chat sessions.
Long waiting times are annoying, so we’ve made it easy to display the number of people in line (for each specific queue tag). Just use the $_live_chats_in_queue system attribute in the “Escalation message” text in the LIVE CHAT block settings, and your users will be able to estimate the waiting time.
Handling timeouts
If the live chat session was not accepted by an agent before the timeout, the “ERROR” exit will be triggered, and you can suggest your customer keep waiting or get her request to be processed manually when an agent is free again.
Accepting queued chats manually
When you have a sudden surge in the number of live chats (think of an internet outage situation for a telecom provider, for example), it’s a common practice to add more human agents to handle these conversations.
When a live chat agent logs into Activechat, by default he/she will be set to “Not accepting chats” mode. This prevents the situation when chats are immediately assigned, and the agent cannot prioritize conversations.
In this mode, the agent can browse queued chats and choose the ones that should be prioritized or require immediate attention (for example, based on customer attributes, location, or segment).
Just choose “Queued” from the “Show” drop-down list:
To accept a specific chat (or transfer it to another agent if you have the "Live chat admin" permission), click the “Accept” or “Transfer to…” buttons at the bottom.
IMPORTANT: You can transfer queued chats to other agents only if you have the “Live chat admin” permission.
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