This chats distribution method is enabled in all live chat accounts by default. The chat is passed to all online agents and any of them can accept it. Once it has been accepted it disappears from other agents’ apps and they can no longer pick it up. This chats routing type is very convenient if your agents multitask and anyone who is free can handle an incoming chat request.
There are two other options of chats routing: round-robin and random. In this case an incoming chat request is assigned randomly or to the agent in the round-robin queue. The round-robin queue is created based on the order in which agents logged in to the agent app.
If your agents receive a steady flow of chats and you would like to rout them evenly among them, choose load balanced round robin or random option. In this case the system will rout an incoming chat to the less loaded agent. This type of chats routing is very convenient if your live chat agents handle cases of different complexity levels when it takes a couple of minutes to solve a simple issue and about 30 minutes to handle a more complicated case.
If you want to provide efficient customer service, you can activate "Accept visitor's calls automatically" feature in your agent app. This way the chat calls will be accepted automatically as soon as they are routed to an agent. This feature will work well for round robin or random chat distributed methods. For "To All" chats distribution method there is no sense in activating this feature since the main purpose of this method is to let all your agents see an incoming chat request and accept it taking into account their expertise or chats load.
You can assign your agents to different departments. When a visitor selects a department on your pre-chat survey the chat request is routed to online agents assigned to the selected department based on the chat distribution rules enabled in the account. Our system also allows inviting agents from other departments if necessary.
During a busy working day it is easy to forget closing in the live chat app an inactive chat where a visitor has left the conversation. To eliminate this situation we added an option which allows closing an inactive chat room automatically after the selected time period.
You need to follow Account Settings / Chat Management page in your account to select live chat routing option and set the time for auto closing of your inactive chat rooms. You can choose the time between 0 and 15 minutes.