Create and manage agents

Once you’ve created a new group, you will be required to select a default routing type. Simply put, a routing type determines how incoming messages will be offered to your agents. Paldesk currently supports three routing types, and you can read more about each of them below.

Where can I select the default routing type?

To set up your group’s routing type, follow these simple steps:

Step 1. Go to Administration > Settings > Groups and select a group from the drop-down menu or create a new one.

Step 2. Next, go down to the Routing type menu and select one of the options.

Step 3. Finally, save changes.

For example:

Video 1. Select routing type in group administation panel

Which routing types does Paldesk offer and how do they work?

As you’ve noticed in the video, Paldesk supports three routing types you can choose from, depending on your preferences; Polite, Democracy and Dictator. They are set per team and you can moderate them in your group settings, as described above. Read more about each type below.

Polite

As the name suggests, the Polite routing type will offer each new conversation to all group members who are currently available (Ready). Agents can modify their status directly from their dashboard, by clicking on the small toggle switch next to their avatar, in the top right corner of the screen. Alternatively, the owner or administrators can manage their availability in Administration > Settings > Agents.

• If several agents are online (Ready), the app will offer a new conversation to each agent until someone accepts. The offer appears in the form of a box with three options: Reject, Accept, or Accept & Open.

• Should an agent reject the offer, the message is offered to the next available agent.

• If an agent decides to accept the new conversation, it will be assigned to them and moved to their Live tab, where they can start replying.

• Alternatively, if an agent decides to Accept & Open the new conversation, they will be redirected into a window where they can immediately reply to the sender.

• Finally, if all agents are unavailable (Not ready), the new conversation will be left in the Unassigned tab.

Image 1. Polite routing type

Democracy 

Unlike Polite, Democracy is fairly simple. All new conversations are left in the Unassigned tab, for agents to assign to themselves, forward or close, depending on the circumstances. The Democracy routing type sends all incoming conversations to Unassigned, regardless of agent status (availability). 

Here’s what that looks like from an agent’s perspective:

Image 2. Democracy routing type

Dictator

Last but not least, the Dictator routing type sends incoming messages to the Live tab of an available (Ready) agent. This routing type heavily relies on agent status, so it’s very important to ensure agents set themselves to available (Ready) in order to start receiving incoming messages.

For instance, a new conversation was automatically sent to this agent’s Live tab:

Image 3. Dictator routing type

• If all agents are unavailable (Not ready), the new conversation will be left in the Unassigned tab.

• However, if there’s more than one available agent, the new conversation will be automatically assigned depending on the last time the agent received a new conversation. What does this mean? Here’s an image that can help explain: 

Image 4. How conversations are assigned in Dictator

And that concludes all you need to know about routing types in Paldesk! If you have any other questions, reach out to us via live chat at paldesk.com or email us at support@paldesk.com. We’ll be more than happy to help you set things up!