Agents are the people who answer customers in your EPAV Desk panel, and teams are groups of agents that share a queue of conversations. You add agents under Admin > Teammates > Agents, put them into teams, and the panel hands each team's waiting conversations to members who are at work.
Where agents and teams live
Open the panel admin with the shield icon in the left icon bar (tooltip Admin), then the Teammates group:
- Agents: the people who sign in to the panel;
- Teams: groups of agents with a shared queue;
- Roles: what each agent may see and do, see Roles and permissions;
- Activity logs: sign-ins and sign-outs, availability status changes, passwords set by an admin, changes to role permissions, and contacts deleted or exported.
You see these pages only if your role allows it: Manage users for agents, Manage teams for teams, Manage activity log for the log. The Admin role has all of them.
What a new platform already has
Your platform starts with one team, First line, and your own account inside it with the Admin role. The team hands conversations out in turn (Round robin), and auto-assignment gives each agent at most 5 open conversations. The AI assistant passes conversations it cannot answer to this team, so you receive them until you add colleagues.
Adding an agent
- Go to Admin > Teammates > Agents and press New agent.
- Fill in First name, Last name and Email.
- Pick one or more Teams. Auto-assignment gives agents conversations only from their own teams.
- Pick at least one role in Roles. For a colleague who answers customers, Agent is enough.
- Tick Send welcome email? if the colleague should get an invitation. It is unticked by default.
- Press Create.
The invitation names your site and the person who added the colleague, and has a Set a password button. The link works for 24 hours. Once the password is set, the colleague signs in at the panel address shown at the bottom of the email. If the link has expired, set a password in the agent's card or let the colleague use Forgot password? (see below).
The invitation goes out only when emails to agents are set up, with your own mail or with the EPAV mailbox. The EPAV mailbox writes only to confirmed addresses, so confirm the colleague's address in the cabinet before you add them. Details are in Notifications and the EPAV mailbox.
Giving access without email
Open the saved agent, type a password into Set password and press Save, then pass the password on to your colleague. The password needs 10 to 72 characters with at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number and one special character.
If agent emails are set up, the colleague can also press Forgot password? on the sign-in page and set a password from the link. See Signing in to the panel.
Importing many agents
On the agents page, Import takes a CSV file with the columns first_name,last_name,email,roles,teams. Role and team names must match the panel exactly, including capital letters. Put several roles or teams in quotes, for example "Agent,Admin".
Imported agents get no invitation email. Set their passwords in their cards, or ask them to use Forgot password?.
Disabling or deleting an agent
To stop someone from signing in, open their card, untick Enabled and press Save. The account and its history stay, an open panel of theirs stops working, auto-assignment skips them, and a disabled agent does not take a seat in your plan. This is the better choice when a colleague leaves. Conversations already assigned to them stay assigned, so hand those to colleagues.
Delete in the agent's row menu removes the agent for good after a confirmation. Their conversations that are not resolved yet lose the assignee, and those that belong to a team go back to the team queue. You cannot delete your own account.
Teams
Create a team under Admin > Teammates > Teams with the New button. A team has:
- Emoji and Name;
- Auto assignment type: Round robin hands conversations to members in turn, Manual leaves them for members to pick up;
- Maximum auto-assigned conversations: how many open conversations an agent may hold before auto-assignment skips them; 0 means no limit. Only statuses in the Open category count;
- Timezone and Business hours, used to count SLA deadlines;
- SLA policy, applied when a conversation is assigned to the team.
The team form has no member list. You add an agent to a team in the agent's card, field Teams. Each member sees the team under Team Inboxes in the conversation list. SLA and business hours are explained in Macros, tags, SLA and business hours.
Who has read a conversation
Under the last message a teammate has read, the conversation shows their avatar; hovering it shows who and when. Your own reading is not shown. The same list, seen_by, comes with the conversation in the panel API, so an integration can tell whether any agent has looked at a conversation.
Availability status
Every agent has a status that the panel keeps by itself:
- Online while the panel is open in a browser tab;
- idle after 5 minutes without mouse or keyboard activity, and online again at the next movement;
- Offline about 5 minutes after the panel is closed.
Your user menu (click your avatar in the sidebar) has two switches: Away stops auto-assignment from giving you new conversations, and Reassign replies also releases your conversations when customers come back to them. An admin can set the same states in the agent's card under Availability status: Active, Away or Away and reassigning. That is handy when someone goes on holiday.
Who gets conversations automatically
Auto-assignment works in teams set to Round robin. It takes open conversations that belong to the team but have no agent and gives them to members in turn. Only statuses in the Open category count: a resolved or snoozed conversation without an agent is left alone until it is open again. Higher priority goes first, then the oldest conversation.
An agent is skipped when they are Away, Away and reassigning or Offline, or already hold the team's maximum of open conversations. An idle agent with the panel open still receives conversations. When nobody can take a conversation, it waits in the team queue, visible in the Supervisor panel. In Manual teams members pick conversations from their Team Inboxes.
Reassign replies while away
With Reassign replies on, when a customer's reply reopens one of your resolved or snoozed conversations, the conversation comes back without you as the assignee. It stays with its team, so in a Round robin team auto-assignment gives it to a colleague who is at work.
The team that receives handoffs
The AI assistant passes a conversation to people through its Fallback team: Admin > AI > Assistants, open the assistant, field Fallback team. On a handoff the assistant leaves a private note with the reason, moves the conversation to that team and removes itself as the assignee. Then auto-assignment and team notifications take over.
If the assistant has no fallback team, a handover only removes the assistant as the assignee. A conversation that had no team then has neither a team nor an agent: nobody receives it automatically, and the Supervisor panel counts it under Orphaned. Keep a fallback team set. More in Handoff to agents and back.
A new platform also has the automation rule Handoff to a team → notify the team. Whenever a conversation is assigned to a team, it sends every member of that team a panel notification, and an email once agent emails are set up. See Automation rules.
Seats per plan
Each plan includes a number of agent seats, plus the AI assistant:
| Plan | Agents |
|---|---|
| Lite | 1 |
| Basic | 5 |
| Ultra | 25 |
| AI chat | 1 |
A seat is an enabled agent account. On Lite and AI chat the only seat is your own account. Disabled agents do not count.
Going over the limit switches nothing off. On Lite, Basic and AI chat the cabinet suggests a plan that fits. On a paid Ultra subscription extra agents cost €10 a month for every 10 agents over 25, excluding VAT, and the overage invoice comes at the start of the next month. Details are in Plans, limits and billing.
Service accounts in the list
Your agent list can also show built-in service accounts that EPAV Desk uses to run your site: they take no seat, and you should not edit or delete them.