How are discussions distributed when sent to a department

When Automatic Distribution is enabled and you select a department as discussion partner, Bold360 automatically assigns the discussion to an available agent in that department. In many respect, a discussion is treated as a chat work item. Similarly to chats, Automatic Distribution is responsible for routing discussions to agents.

You can set up automatic distribution for chats and chat discussions either for all agents of your organization or for a specific department. To enable Automatic Distribution for chats and discussions, at admin.bold360.com, go to Channels > Chat > Automatic Distribution and enable Enable automatic distribution. To limit the number of discussions an agent can take at a time, select Concurrent discussion limit.

Important: You can override Concurrent discussion limit at department level.

The following Automatic Distribution settings influence routing within the selected department:

Reassign unanswered messages (seconds)
When selected, discussions are reassigned to another agent when the originally assigned agent does not answer the discussion within the specified period of time.

An agent who fails to answer in time is set to Away status on the Chat channel to prevent new discussions (and chats) from being assigned. The agent must then explicitly set their status to Available.

Reassign messages after agent disconnected (seconds)
When an agent disconnects (for example, after logging out), Automatic Distribution reassigns all active chats and discussions to other agents after the defined period of time. When the agent disconnects due to network connectivity issues, discussions are reassigned after at least two minutes. Therefore, even if you set the Reassign messages after agent disconnected value to 30 seconds, discussions will only be reassigned after two minutes. Keep in mind that if no agents are available to take additional workload then discussions will be placed in queue.
Agents waiting for assignment

To determine which waiting same-rank agent gets the next discussion, choose an assignment method:

  • Least Busy. Assign the next incoming discussion to the agent who has the highest chat capacity and has waited the longest. Choose this to balance the chat and discussion workload between agents.
  • Most Busy. Assign discussions to your busiest agents who has the lowest chat capacity. The next incoming discussion is assigned to the agent who is handling the most chats and discussions until their limit is reached, and thereafter to the agent who has been idle for the shortest period of time. To prevent overload on a single agent, make sure concurrent chat limits are set.
  • Round Robin. Rotate discussion assignment among all available agents regardless of waiting time or number of active chats and discussions (until their concurrent limit is reached). Choose this option to balance the number of chats and discussions assigned per agent. Lower ranked agents will only be assigned a discussion if all higher ranked agents have reached their chat capacity limit.