How to Manage Tickets When Agents are Unavailable
When the assigned agent is unavailable, you can either reassign their unclosed tickets to another agent, notify the customer about the agent’s unavailability, or inform another available agent about the situation and request them to handle the tickets.
This article provides more details on managing tickets when the assigned agent is unavailable.
Setting agent availability status
The agent’s availability status can be modified by both the administrator and the respective agent.
a. Admin-controlled availability
Admin can set an agent’s availability status to ensure that ticket assignment processes are aligned with the actual availability of support staff. To set the status of an agent,
- Navigate to Admin > Agents.
- Select the desired agent in Select Agent to modify their availability.
Note: Setting an agent’s status to Offline will prevent new tickets from being auto assigned to them.
b. Agent-controlled availability
Agents can take control of their availability status if the feature is enabled in the Agent Portal Settings.
Agents can set their availability status in their profile menu, eliminating the necessity for administrators to modify the agent’s status.
To learn more about how to change the agent availability status, refer to this article.
c. Automated Status Updates with Shifts
Agent availability status will automatically adjust based on their shift hours.
Online Status: The agent’s status changes to “Online” at the beginning of their shift.
Offline Status: The agent’s status switches to “Offline” at the conclusion of their shift.
For more details on setting up agent shifts, refer to this article.
Handling assigned tickets for unavailable agents
a. Reassignment of unclosed tickets
When an agent is unavailable, their unclosed tickets can be managed by either disabling auto-assignment or manually reassigning the tickets.
To disable auto-assignment, navigate to the agent’s group settings and select the Reassign the Unclosed Tickets option.
Choose a new agent or group to handle the reassigned tickets.
Alternatively, you can bulk update the assignee field to reassign the unavailable agent’s tickets to an available agent using the advanced filter options. You can select the tickets that need to be reassigned.
To learn more about how to bulk-update multiple tickets, refer to this article.
b. Using a trigger to enable automatic reassignment
You can find detailed instructions on how to use the Update Ticket Trigger to set up automatic reassignment of tickets to another available agent when the current agent is unavailable to respond to customer replies in this article.
c. Email alerts to customers
Informing customers about an agent’s unavailability can be automated through email notifications.
This can be achieved by creating an Update Ticket Trigger rule with the specified condition and action to notify customers when they reply to a ticket and the assigned agent is offline.
You can find the details about how to add agent availability-related fields in ticket automation in this article.
Note: To ensure prompt responses, specific agents or groups can be notified when the assigned agent is offline, and a customer replies to their ticket. You can use the Send Email to Group option to send an email notification to a specific agent group.
