Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Agents set to away automatically when they stop working. Prevents conversations going nowhere, and irritates people if set too tightly.
Set it
- Open the agent status settings in Admin Center.
- Set the idle timeout.
- Choose what status they move to.
- Tell agents it exists and how it works.
The problem it solves
An agent who goes to a meeting without changing their status is still marked available. Live conversations route to them and wait, and the customer sees nothing happening.
Idle timeout catches that automatically.
Set it generously
Long enough that reading a long ticket, taking a call, or thinking about a difficult reply does not trigger it. An agent thrown to away while genuinely working loses their place in the queue and learns to distrust the whole mechanism.
What counts as activity
Interaction with the interface. Somebody on the phone, or reading a document in another window, may register as idle while working hard.
That is worth saying out loud, because agents assume it knows more than it does.
Coming back
Returning to available should be quick and obvious. If it is awkward, agents will avoid going away at all, which is the opposite of what you wanted.
It is not attendance monitoring
Idle time reflects meetings, phone calls and thinking. Reading it as time not working is both wrong and the fastest way to get agents gaming their status.
Tune it after a fortnight
Ask agents whether it fires while they are working. That question, once, gets the setting right.
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