Presence, capacity and next item: how omnichannel routing decides who works on what

Routing rules (Settings > Routing) distribute conversations, cases and tasks. This article covers the pieces that decide WHO can receive an item and in WHAT ORDER work is served.

Routing rules (Settings > Routing) distribute conversations, cases and tasks. This article covers the pieces that decide WHO can receive an item and in WHAT ORDER work is served.

Your status (presence) Every person has one status: Available, Busy, Break, Lunch, Training, Offline, plus any the administrator adds. Change it in the Work panel (bottom-left button) or in Settings > Routing > My availability. The same status is read by conversation and case routing, by the Next item button and by the voice queue: setting Lunch means no new items and no ringing.

Each status says what it does: whether it receives new items, whether it releases the items you already have (used by the "assignee unavailable" trigger), whether it returns to Available by itself (Break after 15 minutes, Lunch after 60) and whether it requires a reason. Someone without a declared status receives items as before.

Administrators see the team live in Support > Supervision: status, since when, load and time per status today. What appears there is what each person declared plus the open items the system already counts. There is no screen, keyboard or location tracking, and a status set by an administrator is recorded as such.

Weighted capacity By default the limits are counts (at most N open conversations, cases, tasks). Weighted capacity (Settings > Routing > People) lets you say that a critical case weighs 6 units and a chat weighs 2, and give each person a capacity in units. Load is the sum of the units of everything open, across channels. Routing and the Next item button stop offering items to someone who is full. Turn it on only if you want it; off, nothing changes.

Next item (pull) The Work panel and the case console have a Next item button. It serves the top of the queue you can take: SLA already breached first, then the closest deadline, then priority, then whoever has been waiting longest. It respects your status, your capacity, the queues you belong to and the skills those queues require. If nothing is for you, the button says why (status, capacity, queue membership, skill). Two people clicking at the same moment get different items.

New rule conditions Rules can now match on the customer's language (declared on the contact or company, or detected from the text; unknown language never matches), country and state, account tier and key accounts, the case product, the linked incident severity, and the SLA target (for example, first response target up to 60 minutes). Round robin and least load can be limited to people of a territory. A condition only matches when the fact is known; an item without that data goes to the next rule.

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