Say when you are available, cap how much each agent carries, and take time off without conversations going unanswered.
Each agent picks a status from the inbox header:
When you close the inbox on every device you show as Offline. Open it again and your last status comes back, so an Away you set before lunch is still Away when you return.
Each agent has a limit on how many open conversations they are given at once. It starts at 5. Owners and admins change it from the agent's page under Support Agents, or on Desk from Support teams.
A team can set its own limit for a member, for example a lower one for a specialist who also covers another queue. Set it from the team's members list. A member without a team limit uses their own.
Time off is set under Out of office in the dashboard, from the inbox, or on Desk. Give it a start, an end if you know it, and a note for your colleagues. You set your own; owners and admins can set anyone's, and a team supervisor can set it for members of their team.
Time off belongs to the person, so it covers both support and lead work. While it lasts:
Hand back my open conversations is on by default. When your time off starts, the conversations you hold go back to their team's queue. Turn it off to keep them; any of them where the customer writes in while you are out goes back to the queue at that moment.
When your time off ends you come back as Offline. Pick your status when you are ready. Conversations that went back to the queue stay with whoever took them.
A conversation handed to a team waits in its queue until an agent takes it. Each team chooses how that happens:
Push and round robin hand a conversation only to a member who is Available, connected, not out of office, and under the limit that team gives them.
There is no accept step: the conversation is theirs at once. A default agent named on the flow or channel gets it first when they are on the team and free: Available, not out of office and under their limit. Otherwise it goes out by the team's own routing.
When nobody can take a conversation it waits, longest waiting first. It goes out the moment someone becomes Available, finishes a conversation, or gets a higher limit. Conversations in a manual team or in no team wait for someone to claim them. Priority, wait limits, escalation and service targets apply to every team, manual ones included.
Conversations from Intercom keep Intercom's own assignment and are never handed out here, unless the Intercom deployment's handoff strategy is Universal Inbox Queue. Then they are handed out like any other channel's, and Intercom shows whoever has them. Someone working in Intercom can still take one there; the inbox follows that change, and it counts toward their limit.
An agent can decline a conversation handed to them, with an optional reason. It goes to the next agent who can take it, keeping its place in line, and never comes back to the agent who declined. Declines appear in reporting.
By default members can also claim conversations from their team's queue. Set a push or round robin team to Assigned only and its members take only what is handed to them; they cannot claim, or pick up an unheld conversation by replying to it. Owners and admins can still claim and reassign.
Each conversation has a priority: Low, Normal (the default), High or Urgent. Waiting conversations are handed out highest priority first, then longest waiting. The inbox list marks low, high and urgent conversations with an icon.
Priority is set by:
Any member of a team can be made its supervisor, from the team's members list or on Desk from the team's page. Within their teams, supervisors get escalation alerts, reassign conversations, claim from an assigned-only queue, set priority, and set time off for the members of their teams who are not owners or admins. Owners and admins can do all of this in every team.
Each team has a weekly schedule in its own time zone, written one line per set of days, such as Mon-Fri 09:00-17:00. Leave it empty and the team is always open. Add holidays, one date per line with an optional name, to close the team all day.
Outside business hours a team either holds new conversations in its queue, handing them out when it opens, or lets the bot keep answering so no handoff happens until the team is open. Intercom conversations follow Intercom's own routing unless their deployment uses the Universal Inbox Queue strategy.
A team can set a wait limit in minutes, counted in business hours. A conversation still waiting for an agent then escalates:
Each step happens once for each wait. A conversation that goes back to the queue later starts a new wait.
Each team can set service targets for each priority, in minutes, counted in the team's business hours or around the clock:
Time the bot spends with the customer never counts. Moving a conversation to another team keeps the time already run and switches to that team's targets. Reopening a conversation picks its resolution time up where it stopped.
Each conversation in the list shows its most pressing target as a countdown that turns amber at 75% and red once missed. At 75% the agent holding it is nudged; once missed, the team's supervisors are alerted, and the team can choose to raise its priority or move it to the overflow team. Every missed target is recorded with the time it ran out. Supervisors and admins can open the Breaching soon list to see what needs attention first.
Mark a conversation Waiting on customer when you have asked them something. Its resolution time pauses, and it goes back to open as soon as the customer writes. Snoozing does not pause it.
Owners and admins keep two lists for the workspace: dispositions, how a conversation ended (such as Refund issued or Answered), and breach reasons, why one missed a service target. Each team chooses which dispositions apply to it, or offers them all, and whether closing asks for one:
You can close several conversations at once only when they all get the same disposition. Closes nobody made, when a conversation expires, the bot finishes it, or it is closed in Intercom, ask nothing and show as Closed automatically or Closed in Intercom; anyone on the team can add the disposition afterwards. Once a disposition is given, the person who closed it and the team's supervisors can change it.
Reopening and closing again records a new close. Reports use the latest one.
A team can give its agents a wrap-up window, in seconds, after each close. Until it passes or the agent presses Done, the closed conversation still counts toward their limit, so no new one is handed to them while they finish their notes. The time counts as handling time in reports.
Under Support, Reports shows how the queue is doing over any date range, by team, agent, channel or priority. Owners and admins see the whole workspace; supervisors see their own teams. Each report downloads as CSV.