Availability & routing
Control who's online, set business hours, and choose how incoming chats are assigned to your team.
Availability & routing
Agent availability
Each teammate sets their own status from the availability pill in the top bar:
- Available — you can be assigned new chats and you'll be notified about them.
- Away — you won't be auto-assigned new chats or pinged on your devices. You can still open the console and see everything.
New teammates start as Away, so they opt in when they're ready to take chats.
Your in-app bell still shows waiting chats even when you're Away — it's only device notifications and auto-assignment that pause.
Business hours
By default your chat is always open. To limit it, turn on Business hours in Live Chat settings and set a weekly schedule and timezone. Outside those hours the widget shows your offline message and invites visitors to leave a message (which becomes feedback).
Routing
Choose how queued chats reach your team:
- Manual — every chat lands in a shared queue and anyone available claims it.
- Round-robin — new chats are auto-assigned, one at a time, to available agents.
Each agent has a concurrency limit (3 active chats by default) so no one is overwhelmed. When everyone is at capacity or no one is available, chats wait in the queue.
When no one is online
If chat is outside business hours, or no agent is available, the widget switches to leave-a-message mode. The visitor's message is captured as feedback so nothing is lost — you'll see it in your inbox and can follow up.
Notifications
While you're in the dashboard, a sound and a bell notification alert you to new conversations and waiting chats. Device push notifications go to agents who are marked Available.