Creating custom agent statuses

A status of your own, based on an existing one. Useful where it marks a real distinction, and easy to overdo until nobody picks accurately.

A status of your own, based on an existing one. Useful where it marks a real distinction, and easy to overdo until nobody picks accurately.

Create one

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar and select Omnichannel routing > Agent statuses.
2. Click Create agent status.
3. For each channel, pick the standard status it maps to. That mapping is what decides how work reaches the agent.
4. Name it for what the agent is doing.
5. Under Groups, choose All groups or Only selected groups and pick them.

Custom statuses need Professional or Enterprise; Team and Growth have the four standard ones only, and Professional allows five custom statuses. The four are online, away, transfers only and offline, plus the fallback status used when an agent goes idle.

The base decides the behaviour

A custom status inherits how work is routed from the standard one behind it. The name is for people; the base is what happens.

Getting the base wrong produces a status that reads as unavailable and still receives conversations.

Create one when it changes a decision

"In training" tells a team lead not to expect throughput and not to interrupt. That is a real use.

"Working on email" while already unavailable for live channels adds nothing that the base status did not say.

Name it for the agent's situation

Not for a reporting category. Agents pick from this list several times a day, and a name that reflects what they are doing is one they will pick correctly.

Watch the total

Every custom status lengthens the list. Past five or six options, accuracy falls, and an inaccurate status is worse than a coarse one.

Do not build a timesheet

If the reason for a status is to measure how long people spend on something, that is a different tool. Statuses drive routing; using them for time tracking degrades both.

How many you can have

Professional allows up to five custom statuses. Enterprise and Enterprise Plus allow up to 100.

Five is enough for the ones people use: lunch, meeting, training, focus time. If you are reaching for a hundred, you are probably describing work rather than availability, and that belongs in reporting instead.

You get four statuses without doing anything: online, away, transfers only and offline, plus a fallback status that applies when an agent goes idle.

See also

• Managing the statuses available to agents
• Translating custom statuses with dynamic content
• Analysing agent state and activity