Omnichannel for Customer Service: Various Chat States and Chat Closure
In a series of blogs, I’ve been analyzing Omnichannel for Customer Service (Click here to access a list of the blogs). Now I’d like to look deeper into its Chat feature.
Omnichannel provides various states of a conversation, and, based on the state, it’s easy to manage various incoming conversations simultaneously. Omnichannel works on the Work distribution model: It will assign a chat to an agent, based on Agent Status and capacity.
Every incoming Chat first enters a Default Queue in Omnichannel. (Omnichannel queues are used to collect and distribute workload among agents.) You can create more queues for Omnichannel if needed.
Let’s discuss the various states of a conversation:
- Open: Open State indicates a conversation is in the Default Queue and has not been assigned to any agent. Once a chat is picked up by an agent, the state of the conversation changes to Active. When a customer disconnects or a chat is ended before it is assigned, it moves from Open to Closed.
2. Active: This is when a conversation is picked up by an agent or assigned to an agent based on their status and capacity. When the state changes to Active, the agent’s capacity is filled.
Active to Open → When a chat is transferred by an agent to a Queue after a chat is disconnected and the agent is not able to access it anymore.
Active to Wrap-up → When the agent clicks on the End button on the chat or the customer ends the chat during the conversation.
Active to Waiting → When the agent clicks on X (Session Tab) to close the session but not end it.
An agent can see all assigned and Active chats in the Omnichannel Agent Dashboard under My work items.
3. Wrap-up: This state activates when the agent clicks on the End button on the conversation window. This means the agent is still working on the conversation, such as creating notes or updating information, etc. When the agent clicks on X (Session Tab) of the chat, the state will change from Wrap-up to Closed.
4. Waiting: This is when the agent clicks on X (Session tab) to close the chat but not end the session. In this state, the conversation is not filling your capacity.
Waiting to Close → When a chat times out, due to no conversation between the agent and customer or when the customer ends the conversation.
Waiting to Active → Revives the session from My Work Items by clicking on open to active the chat.
Waiting to Open → When the customer revives the conversation within a specified timeout period while the session is still active in the browser.
5. Closed: When the conversation is completed, the session is closed.
When you close a conversation, you can’t reactivate or reopen the conversation again.
Once a conversation is closed, it is moved to Closed work items on the Omnichannel Agent Dashboard where conversations held during the past 24 hours are displayed.
When an agent is on more than one chat simultaneously, the agent can see the number of unread messages sent by customers, as shown in the image below.
Finally, Omnichannel also has an auto-close feature for conversations. It checks conversations every 24 hours to identify those that have remained in the same state for more than the default-configured time period. These conversations are flagged for automatic closure, and the next time the scheduler runs, these conversations are moved to Closed.
