Agent Desk

3 min read

Agent Desk brings together external contacts, their conversations, and human intervention. From one view, you can review what is happening, assign a case to an agent, or take it over yourself without losing the channel context.

Pro plan

Agent Desk and external channels are available on the Pro and Enterprise plans. If the organization moves down to Free or Basic, its external channels are paused at that moment and the plan change email says so; they come back on by themselves when you return to Pro. See Plans and limits.

Inbox and contacts

Filter threads by status—open, pending, resolved, or archived—and by owner. The list shows each contact's channel and latest message; contacts with no owner carry an amber dot on their avatar, and who is handling each one is shown on their profile. Use the tab on the left edge of the conversation to collapse the list into a column of avatars and give the thread more room; the tab on the right edge does the same with the profile.

The contact profile lets you link the identities of one person across different channels, merge duplicates, and keep notes the agent can use while assisting them. Link your own identities from Account so the system does not treat your messages as those of a customer.

Take over or delegate a case

Every contact has an owner: an agent or a person. While an agent handles it, manual replies remain blocked. When you assign the contact to yourself, the agent stops replying and your messages are sent through the same inbound channel.

Only the owner can reply. You can return the contact to the agent at any time without losing its history, notes, or status. When it gets the contact back, the agent receives what was written while a person was handling it and only replies if the last message is from the customer. Only agents with Available in Agent Desk enabled appear as candidates; see Behaviour and limits.

Review before sending

In draft mode, what the agent writes in a conversation does not reach the customer: it stays in the thread marked as a draft until someone reviews it. Under each draft you can Send it, Edit the text before sending, or Discard it. What a person writes from the panel is always sent directly.

• Per conversation. Turn it on or off with the Draft mode switch in the right-hand panel. The thread header shows Draft while it is on.
• Per channel. In an external channel's settings, Agent replies decides which mode its new conversations start in: Send or Draft. Tick Apply to all when saving to carry it to the conversations it already has; without it, each one keeps its own.

Draft mode only exists on external channels, because drafts are reviewed here. If a channel becomes internal, it goes back to Send together with its conversations. Internal mailboxes have a different option, which leaves emails in the mailbox's own drafts folder; see IMAP/SMTP.

Supervise conversations

Beyond handling contacts, Agent Desk lets you find and review the organization threads you can access. Filter by contact or channel, agent, channel type, status, and model to check how a case was handled or find pending activity.

The button in the thread header switches to the compact view, which removes avatars to make better use of the conversation's width. The preference is remembered in the browser.

Privacy

View permission does not automatically open other members' personal conversations. Those threads remain private unless temporary debugging access is granted.