Online-Agent Gating

Convot only assigns new conversations to agents who are online at the time the conversation is created. An offline agent will not receive a routed conversation, even if a rule explicitly targets them. This prevents conversations from being silently assigned to someone who isn’t there.

How availability is determined

An agent is considered available for routing when they have an active availability period open in the system with a routable status. In practice, this means:

• The agent has set their status to Online (visible to visitors and available for assignment).
• They have not manually set themselves to Away or Offline.
• They have not been automatically flipped offline by a schedule or inactivity.

Agents who are online but “busy” (actively working but not taking new chats) may or may not be included depending on your setup.

What happens when a target agent is offline

If a routing rule’s “Assign to agent” action targets an agent who is currently offline:

• The action is silently skipped.
• Routing falls through to the default strategy (load-balanced, round-robin, or manual).
• The conversation is not held or queued for the offline agent.

This means conversations always get assigned to someone who can respond - you trade “always goes to the right person” for “always goes to someone awake.”

Agents marking themselves online

Agents control their own availability from:

• The availability toggle in the bottom-left of the app (the status indicator next to their avatar).
• Setting their status to Online or Away.

A scheduled availability feature (if configured) can flip agents on or off based on a time schedule automatically.

Checking who is online

On the Team Members page (Settings → Team), the Online column shows which agents currently have an active session. This is the live “currently online” indicator, separate from their stored “Visible to visitors” preference.