Agent Status and Live Chat

Within SmarterTrack, each department that is added can be broken down into individual groups, with each group containing different agents. Of course, departments do not have to have multiple groups, but each department needs to have at least ONE group. That said, multiple groups within a department can serve a purpose. For example, a support department may have a Level 1 support group that consists of less experienced support agents who initially triage issues and handle basic support requests. Then, there is a Level 2 group that consists of more experienced support agents who handle more complex issues that require more time and potentially more interaction with the customer. Then, there may be a support management group that oversees the day-to-day, but that can also participate in things like ticket responses and live chats. Each group may have different permissions assigned to it, and different ticket and live chat handling rules, but having multiple groups gives an organizations the ability to assign agents within a single department varying levels of responsibility and/or access to information.

In addition, each agent within each group has a status of "active" or "inactive". Active status indicates that the agent can be assigned new tickets and/or live chats. Therefore, an agent with an inactive status cannot be assigned new tickets and/or live chats. During business hours, most agents should be active, and only go inactive if they are in the middle of a larger task, if they're away from their desks, etc.

Managers can view and edit the status of agents within each group from the Agent Dashboard. They simply select Dashboards from the Navigator and select it from the navigation pane. This dashboard shows active and inactive agents, and managers can edit an agent to change their status as needed. For example, Joe stepped away from his desk to talk to someone in another department about a customer issue. The manager notices he's back at his desk, but he forgot to change his status from "inactive" to "active" -- the manager can use the Agent Dashboard and manually set Joe to an "active" status.

It's worth noting that making an agent Active does NOT necessarily mean they'll actually be assigned a live chat. That is also dependent on their availability. If, on the Agent Dashboard, an agent is "active" but they're "unavailable", they will not be automatically assigned a new live chat when it comes in, though they can take that live chat. In order for an agent to be assigned a live chat, they must be "available" as well as "active" in the group. If the manager notices that an agent is showing up as unavailable, they should find out why. It could be that they're on a phone call using SmarterTrack Communicator, so they were automatically set to unavailable by SmarterTrack, or they manually set themselves as unavailable when they took a call using another soft-phone.

The Agent Dashboard gives managers the ability to view the following information:

Active and Inactive tabs that list agents by their status.
The availability of the agent -- whether they're "available" or "unavailable".
Both tabs display the Ticket, Chat, and Call groups the agent is part of, and their status in each. For example, Joe is a member of 6 ticket groups. However, his "Ticket Groups" shows 4/6. That means he's set at "active" in 4 of those 6 ticket groups.
The number of Active Tickets assigned to each agent.
The number of active live chats assigned to each agent and the number of concurrent live chats they can handle. For example, Beth is set to take 3 concurrent live chats. Her "Active Chats" status shows 1/3, meaning she has 1 active chat out of the 3, total, she can take.
Whether the agent is on an active call or not. (NOTE: This column is only used in conjunction with the SmarterTrack Communicator.)

To access this information, click the live chat icon, then click Active Live Chat Groups in the navigation pane.