Skip to main content

​
Overview

When a visitor sends their first message, Custral assigns the Conversation to a user using the chat channel’s routing rules, and adds them to the conversation as its agent. The default channel for chat is the workspace-wide chat Channel; create per-page or per-segment Channels for finer routing. Chat uses the same routing engine as email, SMS and voice, see Routing Rules for the full behaviour, including availability gates and the 30-day analytics on each rule.

​
Rule evaluation

Rules are evaluated top-down on the first inbound message, and the first rule that matches and can name an available agent wins. Rules match on:
  • Day of week, time of day, and an optional date range (in the workspace timezone).
  • Whether the candidate is online, under their open-conversation cap, and holds the skills the rule requires.
If no rule produces an agent, Custral falls back to the channel’s own people, whoever the channel says works it, and leaves the conversation unassigned only when it names nobody. Where that is a team, the team’s own sharing setting picks which member, exactly as a rule naming it would.
Matching on visitor attributes or the page URL the visitor is on is not supported today. Use separate chat Channels per page or segment, each with its own rules, to get the same effect.

​
Hand-off and load

Point a rule at a team and the team decides how its work is shared, evenly, by load, or on shifts. Set once on the team rather than on each rule. Agents who are offline or at their cap are skipped when the rule gates on those.

​
Assigned, or offered

A chat that names one person is assigned to them. A chat that names several is offered to all of them, belongs to nobody until someone replies, and the first reply claims it. A claim never takes a chat from a colleague who got there first. See Routing Rules for the full table. Answer-bot chats are deliberately not counted against anyone’s open-conversation cap while the bot is holding them, so a busy bot cannot make a human look busy.

​
Bot first, human second

A common pattern is to have an AI Agent handle the first message and only escalate to a human when needed. Set up a workflow that triggers when a conversation is created and hands it to a chat agent; when the agent decides to escalate, it routes the Conversation to a rule pointing at a team that is on shifts. See on-call. Until the bot escalates, the chat is not assigned to a person at all.

​
Next steps