At the moment the behavior of phone calls on Intercom do the following:
- When an agent picks up a call, it automatically sets their status to offline if they are online (this affects both phone calls and chats).
- When an agent hangs up a call or a live call is disconnected, it automatically sets their status to online (regardless if they were online or offline before the call).
For 1, this causes major issues with our chat automations/assignments/etc. If someone picks up a call, it sets them to offline and the agent is not assigned new chats. If they have ongoing chats, it may cause an automatic offline message to be sent to the user. We’ve been told by Intercom that this is by design so as to avoid agents from getting overwhelmed. It is not feasible or scalable for teams to only take one call or chat at a time, and most teams do not operate this way anyways. For our team it just means more stress as they often have to manually toggle themselves to online once they pick up a call.
For 2, if someone who is offline makes a one-off call, they often do not remember that they will automatically be set to online after making the call, which causes them to accidentally be online and therefore unintentional longer wait times for users calling in.
In summary:
- active chats may receive offline responses and delayed handling.
- qualified agents are removed from chat queues while on calls.
- agents forget they’ll be set online after an outbound call, leading to unwanted availability.
- agents must manually toggle status repeatedly to work across channels.
Suggestions:
- A classic setup would look like: agent sets themselves to online, which allows them to receive calls and chats. Only 1 call per agent at a time, the number of live chats one can be assigned (i.e. conversations not in closed or snoozed status) can be customized or set at a team or individual agent level. (see attached logic diagram proposal)