How to Allow Agents to Change Their Chat Availability in Different Departments

This article explains how to enable agents to manage their own chat availability status across different departments in LiveAgent.

Overview

By default, only supervisors, managers, or admins can change an agent's service availability (chat, messaging, and calling) for different departments. However, you can permit individual agents to change their own availability status by enabling a specific setting in their profile.

Step-by-step instructions

1. Navigate to Agents in your LiveAgent configuration.
2. Select the agent whose profile you want to edit and click Edit.
3. Go to the Departments tab.
4. Locate the "Allow user change status in department" checkbox.
5. Check the checkbox to enable this permission.
6. Click Save to apply the changes.

What this setting does

When enabled, the agent will be able to:

• Change their own availability status (online/offline/away) for each department they are assigned to
• Manage their own service allocation for chat, messaging, and calling services per department
• See their availability controls without a lock icon in the Work allocators window

When disabled, the agent will see a lock icon next to their availability controls, indicating they cannot change their own status. Only supervisors, managers, or admins can modify their availability in this case.

Important notes

• This setting applies per agent and per department
• Supervisors, managers, and admins can always change agent availability regardless of this setting
• The setting must be enabled individually for each agent who needs this permission
• Changes take effect immediately after saving