Understand agent availability

To ensure that end users are not kept waiting, it's helpful to know how many support agents are available to join live chats at any given time. The mechanism for this is agent availability.

How availability gets used

You can check current agent availability within the agent dashboard.

Each live support node has a "Max concurrent conversations per agent" setting controlling how many live chat conversations can enter the queue. If this setting is changed from its default value of "Unlimited", only agents who are currently available will be used to calculate agent capacity and determine whether a new live chat conversation will be created.

How availability gets set

By default, support agents who are logged in to the agent dashboard are considered available. If the agent logs out or leaves the agent dashboard for two minutes, they become unavailable.

If the preference "Enable agent availability controls" is enabled in live support preferences, agents can manually toggle their availability.

This allows agents to set themselves as unavailable without leaving the dashboard, such as for a coffee break. It also allows supervisors or observers to monitor live chat traffic without being counted as an available agent.