Engage Digital | Intro to channel groups

Channel groups allow administrators to assign different agent capacities — the number of conversations an agent can process simultaneously — to multiple channels at once. The platform uses channel groups and their configurations to route messages to agents in Routing mode.

Components of channel groups

After configuring your channels, you must assign each of them to a channel group to allow agents to use Routing mode. By default, the platform creates two channel groups when Routing mode is enabled: ‘Async’ and ‘Realtime’. You are free to change those names along with the rest of the settings. If needed, you can add additional channel groups to your account.

A channel group primarily defines the default capacity and max capacity of any agent who is processing conversations from the channels included in that group.

Default capacity: The limit of conversations an agent can process at once while still being able to manually request more messages.
Max capacity: The limit of conversations an agent can process at once, at which point they will not be able to request more.

The platform may still route messages to agents who are absent or disconnected at that moment. To be more efficient and responsive, you can define an interaction timeout that applies to all messages from the channels included in a channel group. The interaction timeout tells the platform how long a message should stay in the queue of an agent who is absent or disconnected. When the interaction timeout expires and the agent is still away, the platform will route the message to another agent.