Introduction: The Foundation of Your Customer Support
Welcome! Building an effective customer support system starts with a solid foundation. On the Businesschat platform, this foundation is built on a clear understanding of user roles, how they are organized into teams, and the automated logic used to assign customer conversations. Mastering these core concepts is the key to providing efficient, organized, and timely support. This guide will break down each of these components for a new learner, explaining how they work together to create a seamless workflow.
1. The Building Blocks: User Roles and Permissions
The platform uses three distinct user roles to manage who can access what and perform specific actions. Each role comes with a different set of permissions, ensuring that team members have the right level of access to do their jobs effectively and securely.
Role | Key Responsibilities & Capabilities | Key Limitations |
Owner | The primary account holder who possesses full Admin privileges. | Cannot be deleted by any other user. |
Admin | Manages all aspects of the account, including adding/removing users, creating teams, modifying business settings, and accessing all conversations and reports. Admins can create assets like WhatsApp templates, saved replies, and topics. | Cannot delete or modify the Owner's account. |
User | Primarily responsible for handling assigned customer conversations. Their access is determined by permissions granted by an Admin. | Standard users cannot create templates, saved replies, or topics. Their visibility is typically limited to their own conversations and those of their team or other teams, depending on the team-level settings. |
In summary, the Owner holds ultimate authority, Admins are the day-to-day operational managers, and Users are the front-line agents focused on customer interaction.
Special Permissions
In addition to the standard roles, the owner or an Admin can grant specific, powerful permissions to any user, allowing them to handle tasks beyond typical conversation management.
Campaigns Permission: Grants the user access to the marketing sections of the platform, allowing them to manage and launch marketing campaigns and automations.
Subscription Management Permission: Allows a user to manage the account's billing information, including accessing and paying invoices and handling payment methods.
Now that we understand the different roles, let's explore how to group these users into effective teams.
2. Organizing for Success: How Teams Work
A "Team" is the primary way to group users for routing conversations and managing workloads. Every user on the platform must belong to at least one team. An Admin can easily create a new team, and then add or remove members as needed directly from the team settings page.
The core purpose of organizing users into teams is to streamline the customer support process. Key benefits include:
Targeted Routing: Allows the chatbot to direct specific customer inquiries to the correct group of experts. For example, a question about "Returns" can be automatically sent to the "Returns Team."
Shared Inbox: Gives all team members access to a shared queue of conversations assigned to their team, enabling collaboration and ensuring no customer is left waiting.
Workload Management: Enables settings like "Working Hours" and "Assignment Limits" to be applied to an entire group of users, helping to manage team availability and prevent burnout.
With users organized into teams, we can now examine the precise logic the platform uses to assign incoming conversations.
3. The Journey of a Conversation: Assignment Logic Explained
The platform uses a clear, automated logic to ensure that incoming customer conversations are assigned efficiently to the right person at the right time. When a conversation is routed to a team, the system follows a specific, step-by-step process.
Check for Active Users: The system first looks for users within the designated team who are currently logged in and have their status set to "Active." It will ignore any users who are offline or in "Watching Mode."
Check Assignment Limits: Next, it filters out any active users who have already reached their maximum number of concurrent conversations (the "Assignment Limit" that is set for their team).
Find the Least Busy User: Among the remaining available users, the system assigns the new conversation to the person who currently has the fewest open conversations (i.e., conversations in their 'My Conversations' queue that are not yet closed).
What if No One is Available?
If all users in a team are offline, in watching mode, or have reached their assignment limit, the conversation will be placed in the Unassigned queue. It will remain there, with the system actively monitoring for an agent to become available. As soon as a user in that team is free, the system will automatically assign the conversation to them based on the standard assignment logic.
Manual and Special Assignments
Beyond the primary automated logic, conversations can be assigned in several other ways:
Manual Reassignment: Any user can manually reassign a conversation they have access to. It can be reassigned to another specific user or moved to a different team's queue.
Sticky Agent: If this feature is enabled by an Admin in the Chatbot Operator settings, a customer who replies to a closed conversation within 24 hours will be automatically reconnected with the same agent who last handled their inquiry.
User Action: If a user replies to a conversation that is currently in the "Bot" or "Unassigned" queue, the system automatically assigns that conversation to them.
This intelligent assignment flow is governed by several key settings that allow you to manage your team's workload and availability.
4. Controlling the Flow: Key Assignment Settings
Admins can fine-tune the automated assignment logic using three main features at the team level. These settings provide managers with powerful tools to control workflow, manage team capacity, and ensure high-quality customer service.
Assignment Limits This is a number set by an Admin for each team that caps the maximum number of conversations a user can have open at one time. This feature is essential for preventing agent burnout and maintaining support quality. Strategically, it also ensures an equitable workload distribution and prevents agents from "cherry-picking" easy conversations, which can lead to frustration and burnout for more diligent team members.
Working Hours Admins can define specific operating hours for each team. This setting is crucial for protecting your business's response time metrics and professionally managing customer expectations. When a customer contacts a team outside of these hours, the chatbot can be configured to send an automated reply informing them when the team will be back online, ensuring they don't feel ignored.
Watching Mode This is a user status that allows a person to be logged into the platform to monitor conversations and reports without being automatically assigned any new conversations. This mode is invaluable for managers overseeing team activity or any user needing to catch up on tasks without being interrupted by new assignments.
Now that you understand the roles, teams, and rules that govern conversation assignment, let's look at how these factors determine who can see which conversations.
5. Access and Visibility: Who Sees What in the Inbox
A user's role and team membership directly dictate what they can see and access within the conversation inbox. The inbox is organized into several views to keep work organized and clear.
My Conversations: This is the primary, personal inbox for a user. It shows all conversations that are currently assigned directly to them.
Team Conversations: This is a shared inbox that shows conversations routed to a user's team. It serves as the team's shared queue. This view contains all conversations assigned to different and individual users within a specific team. Meaning the total number of conversations found in this view equals the number of conversations assigned to all users within that team.
Unassigned: This queue contains all conversations that are waiting for an available agent across any team.
Bot Conversations: This view shows all conversations that are currently being handled by the chatbot before being routed to a human agent.
The key difference in visibility lies in the user's role. A standard User can only see their own conversations and the conversations of the teams they belong to. In contrast, an Admin has universal access and can view all conversations across all teams on the platform.
6. Key Takeaways
This guide covers the essential framework for managing customer support on the Businesschat platform. Here are the three most important points to remember:
Roles Define Capabilities: An individual's role (Owner, Admin, or User) determines their permissions—from managing the entire account to focusing solely on handling conversations.
Teams Organize Work: Teams are the core organizational tool for routing inquiries to the correct experts, managing shared workloads, and applying group-specific settings like working hours.
Logic Automates Flow: The platform uses a precise, automated logic (checking for active status, assignment limits, and current workload) to assign conversations efficiently, ensuring prompt customer service and a balanced agent workload.