Support Teams

Creating teams

A support team is a named group of agents. A workspace owner or admin creates teams under Support Teams in the dashboard and adds agents to each one. Only people with an active inbox seat can be added (see Admin Setup).

An agent can belong to several teams, so teams work as skills as well as departments. You might have a Technical team, a Billing team and a French team, with a bilingual engineer in both Technical and French.

Who sees what

A conversation's team decides who can see it:

• A conversation handed to a team is visible only to that team's members and to workspace owners and admins.
• A conversation with no team is visible to every agent.
• An agent always sees a conversation assigned to them, even if they are not in its team.

Push alerts for a waiting conversation go to the people who can see it, so a Billing handoff does not buzz the Technical team.

Routing a handoff

The Agent Handoff node has a Support Team setting. The conversation goes to the first of these that applies:

1. The team chosen on the Agent Handoff node.
2. The team the conversation is already in, for example one an Assign Support node set earlier in the flow.
3. The deployment's default support team. Set it in the flow editor's deployment settings. On Desk, owners set a default team for each channel.
4. The flow's default support team, set under Flow Settings, Routing. It covers every deployment that does not set its own.
5. No team, which leaves the conversation open to every agent.

The node also has a Support Agent setting. Once the conversation has its team, it goes to the first of these people who can see it there:

1. The agent chosen on the Agent Handoff node.
2. An agent named by an Assign Support step in a Handoff Activated trigger.
3. The deployment's default support agent, set beside its default team. On Desk, owners set it for each channel.
4. The flow's default support agent.
5. The team's next member who can take it, as the team hands out its waiting conversations.
6. Nobody, which leaves it in the queue for the team to pick up.

A default agent who is not in the conversation's team, and is not a workspace owner or admin, is passed over for the next choice. So is one who is not free: Busy, Away, Offline, out of office, or already at their conversation limit.

Routing with a trigger

When the right team depends on what the customer asked about, route in a trigger on the Handoff Activated event. Add a Condition on the routing decision, then an Assign Support node on each branch to put the conversation in a team and, if you like, give it to a specific agent.

For example, if your flow uses a Routing Agent with the node id routing, the Condition can test the route it picked:

{{@flow.routing.route.id}}

• Assign Support never takes a conversation from an agent who already holds it.
• If you name an agent who is not in the team and is not a workspace owner or admin, Assign Support skips the agent and still moves the conversation to the team.
• When the flow has a Handoff Activated trigger, agents are alerted after the trigger has run, so the alert reaches the team that now owns the conversation.

Handing out conversations

A conversation that arrives in a team with no agent named for it waits in the team's queue. On a push or round robin team it goes to the next member who can take it; that member gets an Assigned to you alert, and the rest of the team is not alerted. On a manual team it waits for a member to claim it. How a team picks the member, and whether members may also claim, are covered in Queue Management.

• It applies to handoffs and to conversations transferred to the team without naming an agent.
• It waits for any Handoff Activated trigger, so an agent the trigger names still gets the conversation, and the queue it joins is the team the trigger chose.
• Members whose seat is switched off are skipped. Owners and admins who are not members are never handed conversations from the queue.
• A conversation someone already holds stays with them.

Working with teams in the inbox

Agents can narrow the conversation list to one team with the team filter.

To pass a conversation to another team, transfer it. Pick the team and, optionally, a specific agent in that team. To hand it to a colleague on the same team, reassign it instead. You can reassign only to agents who are in the conversation's team; to reach anyone else, transfer it to their team.