Teammates can set their status to Active or Away. When away mode is enabled, they can also enable the Reassign replies option.
Active: We recommend setting the status to active when the teammate is scheduled to work and is available to receive new conversations.
Away: We recommend setting the status to away when the teammate is occupied with something else for a short while during their shift. It could be a meeting, coaching other teammates, or a break.
Reassign replies: We recommend enabling the reassign replies option when a teammate ends their shift and when they are going away for several days. It’s important when teammates won’t be able to respond to conversations already assigned to them.
The effect of setting a teammate’s status to away
When a teammate’s status is set to away, both balanced assignment and round robin stop automatically assigning conversations to them.
Teammates who belong to multiple workspaces can configure the away status, conversation reassignment and away status reasons independently per-workspace. Changing their status in one workspace, doesn’t impact the status in the other workspace.
Customers can see the teammate’s status (active or away) within the conversation’s view in the Messenger which helps to set the right expectation.
When a teammate has no Intercom tabs open in the web app for more than 5 mins, they appear as Away in the Messenger. However, it doesn’t change their actual status in Intercom and doesn’t impact automatic conversations assignment.
Away Status on Proactive Support messages
If an outbound Message like a Chat or Post is live on your website and the teammate it appears from is automatically set to Away after being inactive for more than 5 minutes or have manually turned on their Away mode, their status on the Messenger will show as 'active in the last 15m' or Away.
The effect of enabling the reassign replies option
When a teammate sets their status to Away, they can enable the reassign replies option. The effect of setting the status to away discussed in the previous section still applies.
In addition, if a customer replies to a conversation assigned to a teammate while they have the reassign replies option enabled:
The teammate gets automatically unassigned from the conversation which puts it back in the team inbox open conversations list. It will be picked up by balanced assignment if it is the assignment method for this team inbox.
If the conversation was assigned to the teammates and doesn’t have a team inbox assigned, it will get automatically assigned to the default assignee.
It is possible to use the API to reassign conversations to a different teammate after a period of admin inactivity on the conversation, however, doing so will require writing some custom code on your end.
First off, you'll want to get notified of new inbound messages via our conversation.user.created webhook topic. This will provide you with a conversation ID.
After that, you'll want to create a scheduled task on your end to check for teammate/admin replies relevant to those IDs. To accomplish this you'll want to subscribe to the conversation.admin.replied webhook topic.
Now, if no teammate replies are created within X amount of time, you can proceed to reassign them to another teammate using our Conversations API endpoint.
Setting an away reason
Teammates can also specify a reason when they set their status to away. This is useful for monitoring purposes, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
New workspaces will come with 9 default Away reasons for immediate use.
Away statuses matching default Intercom-provided reasons are automatically translated, ensuring consistency across multilingual teams.
Reporting will continue to work with custom reasons.
Labels for away reasons are preserved as they were at the time of writing, to maintain historical accuracy for your activity logs.
Workspaces can have a maximum of 100 reasons per workspace.
Customize your Away reason
You can create, rename, archive, and translate Away reasons tailored to your workspace’s specific needs. This enables your teammates to select a reason better aligned with business, which will help your company better understand teammate availability, and track productivity.
Away reason names must be unique. If you wish to reuse labels, you must rename or unarchive and rename the archived reason before creating a new reason with the original label.
Go to Settings > Inbox > Assignments. Then, scroll to the bottom of the General page and click Customize away reasons.
In this section, you can:
Create: Add new reasons by clicking New reason and entering the desired name.
Rename: Modify existing reasons by clicking the edit icon next the reason's name.
Archive: Remove reasons no longer needed by clicking the Archive icon in red.
Archived reasons remain visible for teammates currently set to them.
Archived reasons are hidden from users.
Finally, click Save after making your changes. 🎉
These settings apply to your entire workspace, not individual teams.
Require a reason with Away mode
To ensure agents provide a reason when setting their status to "Away", go to Settings > Inbox > Assignments. Then, toggle on Make away reasons mandatory.
Adjust Phone Settings
If your workspace has phone enabled, certain reasons are used by the system to set teammates to Away mode automatically while on a call, coaching, or wrapping up. Those reasons can not be archived, and can only be renamed.
The reasons associated with phone will have the label ‘Used by Phone channel’ in the away reason settings as seen below. These reasons can be edited, but not archived.
To remove these reasons, you’ll need to update your phone settings:
On a call – To remove this, you’ll need to completely disable phone by removing all phone numbers.
Coaching – To remove this, disable ‘Listen in on calls’.
Call wrap up – To remove this, disable ‘Wrap up time’.
We do not allow a specific reason to be selected for phone functionality, but you can update the name and label of the reason once these reasons are used by phone.
Using the API to set an agent to a particular away reason
You can use the API to programmatically set agents to Away, specifying custom away reasons directly.
Monitoring teammate status & capacity
Support managers also have an overview of teammates’ status and away reasons. This is a great tool for managers to make fast decisions when faced with an increased backlog.
The real-time dashboard
In the inboxes tab of the real-time dashboard, you can see the number of active teammates per inbox. This is useful when used in conjunction with the number of unassigned conversations. It helps managers assess the team’s ability to handle the backlog.
In addition, in the teammates tab, you can see the current status, away reason, and time on status of all teammates who match the applied filter.
You can also mouse over the numbers in the summary to see a breakdown of the away reasons.
Last, if a particular teammate has forgotten to change their status from Active to Away, or Away & reassigning, a manager can change their status themselves.
This action requires the Can change status permission.
Teammates settings
You can also find the teammates status and away reasons in Settings > Workspace > Teammates.
Teammates with the "Can change status" permission can modify other teammates’ status, however, they also require "Can manage teammates, seats and permissions" to access this page.
What’s next?
Monitor your most important metrics in one place: the real-time dashboard.
Set your reply time to let customers know when your team usually responds to conversations.
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