Bots, teams, and assignment rules

Since bots are designed to deal with repetitive works, setting up a team and assignment rule for bots is necessary to utilize Bots. This guide explains the relationship and usage of Bots, Teams, and Assignment rules, also covering the information on bot status.

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Note: Before reading this guide, we recommend you read Introducing Bots, which will help you gain a more fundamental understanding of Bots.

This user guide contains the following information:

• Recommended usage
• Bot status
• Bot status and assignment rules
• Bots and teams

The following is the most recommended usage when getting your bot up and running using Teams and Assignment rules.

1. Go to Settings > Bots and create a bot and activate the bot.
2. Go to Settings > Teams and add the bot to at least one team.
3. Go to Settings > Rules > Assignment, create a bot-dedicated assignment rule and turn on the rule.

Note: Even when a bot belongs to a team, it isn’t governed by a team-dedicated assignment rule. It’s because team-dedicated assignment rules use ticket auto routing when assigning a ticket to an agent, but bots are excluded from ticket auto routing since they can receive and handle limitless amounts of tickets.

Bots have connection status and active status similar to live agents. You can manage both statuses in Agents or manage active status in Settings > Bots.

Bots have the following two types of connection status.

• Online: Indicates that the bot is online and can receive tickets.
• Offline: Indicates that the bot is offline and can only receive manually assigned or transferred tickets from other agents. Before setting it offline, you should leave a bot’s tickets in current teams or transfer them to another team.

Note: Bots don’t have Away status.

Bots have 3 types of active status as same as live agents. However, the definition of Waiting for bots is slightly different.

• Waiting: Indicates that the bot is created but can't be activated due to incomplete settings.
• Activated: Indicates that the bot’s account is activated in Desk and they can receive tickets and support customers.
• Paused: Indicates that a bot’s account is paused in Desk. Paused bots remain in their teams but can’t receive tickets.
• Deactivated: Indicates that the bot’s account is deactivated in Desk and they can't access Desk as an agent. Deactivated bots can no longer receive tickets and are removed from their teams. Before deactivating a bot, you should leave a bot’s tickets in current teams or transfer them to another team.

For the differences between Offline and Deactivated, refer to the table below.

Bot-dedicated assignment rules have a dependency on a bot’s status. Refer to the following table for the details.

Note: When a bot is activated again after the deactivation, the rule that had applied to the bot becomes valid when you add the bot back to the same team and select it in the Assignment rules edit page.

Technically, bots can function independently without being a part of a team and receive a ticket through either Platform API or manual transfer. However, as introduced throughout this document, bots' capabilities can be maximized when it is used with assignment rules and placed within at least one team.

When creating an assignment rule, you can only select a team among a bot's teams to use it as a backup when the bot is offline. To provide continuous support for tickets intended to be assigned to the bot, tickets are assigned to available agents in the selected team when you change the bot's status to Offline.