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Dedicated Agent

Last Update: Oct 2024 • Est. Read Time: 3 MIN
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Relationships are naturally built over time between your customers and individual agents on your team. Over time, you may find that maintaining that relationship is important to your customer's overall satisfaction with your organization.

With the Dedicated Agent feature, you can link a specific agent to a customer's profile to increase the chances that the customer gets consistently paired with the same agent. This increases the likelihood that their inquiry is handled efficiently and effectively and is an impactful way to offer white-glove support by offering a lasting, human-to-human relationship between a customer and your team members.

Who can access this feature?
User types
  • Admins can turn on this feature in Routing settings.
  • Users with a Manager or above default permission set, or any custom set that has access to the attribute, can edit this field to choose which user they want to set as the dedicated agent for a customer.


In this article

Prerequisites

Before setting a dedicated agent for a customer, you need to have routing configured for your teams. 

How it works

When an incoming conversation is received, Kustomer first checks to see whether or not that customer has a dedicated agent linked to them. If they do, we check the agent's current status and/or availability and route the conversation through one of the following workflows: 

Scenario
Outcome
No dedicated agent linked to customerConversation follows normal routing rules and is routed to the next available agent.
Dedicated agent is in an unavailable status or offlineConversation follows normal routing rules and is routed to the next available agent.
Dedicated agent is online and has capacityConversation is routed to the dedicated agent.
Dedicated agent is online and does not have capacityConversation waits to route for that channel's specified timeout:
  • If the agent becomes available during this time, the conversation is routed to them.
  • If the allotted time passes and the agent is still at capacity, the conversation follows normal routing rules and is routed to the next available agent.


If the customer doesn't have an agent linked to them, the conversation is routed based on your queue rules. For more information, see Channel timeouts.

If a conversation is moved to another timeline, any existing dedicated agent assignments will remain in place until you change or remove them.

Activate the dedicated agent feature

You can activate this feature from the General Queues & Routing settings page.

  1. Go to Settings > Platform > Routing.
  2. Select the Setting tab.
  3. Expand the Dedicated Agent section and turn the Dedicated Agent setting on.
  4. Configure the timeout settings for each one of your available channels.
  5. Select Save Changes.

Channel timeouts

Once you link a dedicated agent to a customer, we will always try to route conversations to them. However, there may be times when the agent is at full capacity or offline and can't have a conversation routed to them. You can configure how long the router will wait for the agent to become available before routing conversations through the regular routing flow. The default timeout for all channels is 5 minutes. You can set this value anywhere between 5 seconds to 60 minutes.

Link a dedicated agent to a customer

To link a dedicated agent, select Customer Profile for the customer, select the agent from the Dedicated Agent field, and then select Update to save your changes. 

Note: You only have access to this field if you have a Manager or above default permission set, or are assigned to a custom permission set with access to this attribute.

Once specified, a customer's conversation will always get routed to their dedicated agent as long as the agent is available and has the capacity to take on another conversation.