Agent status (availability)

Every agent has one of three states and sets it themselves, in the user menu at the bottom left of the sidebar. The three entries sit under the heading “Availability”.

A dot shows the state. “Available” carries a green dot, “Busy” an amber one, “Away” an empty ring.

The three differ not only in colour but also in the fill, so somebody who has trouble telling colours apart still sees the difference.

Your own dot sits on your account picture at the bottom left, so you do not have to open the menu to see it.

When you assign a ticket, the state stands behind the name. If an end of the absence has been recorded, it stands there too.

An agent who is not available stays selectable and is only marked as such. Whether the ticket goes to them anyway is your decision.

You are only ever offered the agents of the team the ticket belongs to.

Only agents and administrators have a state. A customer does not have one.

Somebody who is ill rarely signs off first. That is why an administrator can set the state for another person, in the edit form of the account under “User management”.

The form has two fields for this. “Availability” holds the state, “Away until” holds the end of the absence.

The second field only appears with “Away”. There is no end to enter for “Busy” or “Available”.

Without a date the absence lasts until somebody ends it. With a date it ends on its own. The hint below the field says so: “Leave empty for an absence without a set end.”

A date in the past is not accepted. It would have expired immediately, and your colleague would still be standing in the list as available.

Both fields only appear for agents and administrators. If you set the role to “Customer” in the same form, they disappear.

One field carries both. A day of sickness and three weeks of holiday are the same thing to the system, with a different date.

“Busy” lasts one hour. After that the agent is available again without having to do anything. Saving the user form does not extend “Busy”.

The menu shows the remaining time next to the state, for example “60 min left”.

The hour is fixed. It is a safety net against forgetting, not a rule of operation. Anyone who is unavailable for longer picks “Away”.

The reset is a point in time, not a job. The account holds the moment the state ends, and the state is worked out when somebody reads it. If the server was off during that hour, the agent is simply available again afterwards. No backlog is left for a background service to catch up on.

“Away” only expires if an end has been recorded. Without one it stays until somebody changes it.

When agents set themselves to “Away”, they cannot enter an end. Only an administrator hands out an end date. If one is already set, it stays when the agent picks “Away” again.

The system only remembers which state is in force right now. It does not record who was busy or away and when.

That is why the user list shows the state as of now and nothing more. There is no column with a history and no report on attendance.

This is a decision, not a missing piece. Availability data per person is behavioural data, and in many companies the works council has a say in it.

A history is not needed either. The state answers a single question: is this colleague available right now? “Busy” ends by itself after an hour.

How many tickets an agent has is something you see in the ticket list, where “Assigned to” filters by one person. How long somebody was away is written down nowhere.