Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Agents need explicit access to messaging channels, and being available for messaging is separate from being available at all.
Give access
- Open Admin Center, then People > Team > Team members, and open the person.
- Go to the Roles and access tab and tick the Access checkbox beside Chat. This is the step people miss, and without it the role dropdown does nothing.
- In the Role dropdown beside Chat, choose Agent, then Save.
- Make sure they are in a group that receives messaging conversations.
- Confirm a capacity rule covers them for the messaging channel.
All of it is needed. An agent with the role but no capacity rule, or in the wrong group, receives nothing and looks available.
Chat's own roles are Agent, Administrator and Account owner, and an administrator keeps every agent privilege on top of the admin ones. So unlike voice there is no penalty for giving somebody the senior role: they can still take conversations.
One constraint to know before you start handing out roles: where Chat and Support are joined up, somebody must be an administrator in both or in neither. You cannot make a Support agent a Chat administrator.
Statuses are per channel
The part that surprises teams moving from email. An agent can be available for email and unavailable for messaging at the same time, deliberately, so someone working through a backlog is not interrupted.
It also means an agent who thinks they are available may not be, for the channel that matters.
Tell agents what changes
Messaging is different work from email. Conversations arrive while you are in one, they expect a faster rhythm, and several run at once.
Agents who have only done email need to know that, and they need a capacity number that reflects it. Two live conversations is not the same as ten emails.
Start with a few
Give messaging to two or three agents first. They learn the rhythm, they tell you what the configuration gets wrong, and they teach the rest.
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