Teams and routing

Routing decides which agent a waiting chat is offered to. It is configured on teams, so different parts of your operation can behave differently.

Teams

A team is a group of agents (for example, Billing or Technical). A team that has live chat enabled can receive queued conversations. Each team carries its own live-support configuration, so the Billing queue can behave differently from the Technical queue.

Routing strategies

A team chooses one routing strategy:

• Balanced (the default): the built-in algorithm spreads chats fairly across available agents.
• Round robin: offers chats to eligible agents in rotation.
• Manual claim: chats sit in the shared queue and agents claim them.

Skill and language routing

Members carry skills and languages, and so do teams and individual queue entries. An entry is only reserved to a member whose skills cover the entry's required skills and whose languages include the entry's language. This routes a French billing question to someone who can actually answer it.

Priority routing

When priority routing is on, a queue entry's priority score orders picking ahead of plain arrival time, so an urgent chat is offered before an older but lower-priority one. Turn it off for a strict first-in, first-out queue.

Overflow and limits

A team can set:

• A maximum queue size and a maximum wait time, past which entries overflow to a designated overflow team.
• A shift-end buffer that stops new assignments a set number of minutes before the team's business hours close, so nobody is handed a chat they cannot finish.
• A queue pause that stops new reservations for the team while existing chats continue.

Overflow records the origin team on each spilled entry, so reporting can tell the difference between a chat that started in a team and one that spilled into it.