Two settings decide who deals with what, and who is around to do it.
Two separate ideas
- Teams
- Groups of people. Billing, Support, Sales. Conversations can be routed to a team rather than a person.
- Presence
- Whether somebody is available right now.
They work together: presence is how a team knows which of its members can actually pick something up.
What a team is
A named group of members with a colour, created under Settings, then Members, then Teams.
People can belong to more than one team, which matters more than it sounds. In a small company the same person is often support and billing both.
How to create a team
- 1Go to Settings, then Members, then Teams.
- 2Click Create your first team, or add another.
- 3Give it a name and a colour, such as Support, Sales or Billing.
- 4Add the members who belong to it.
It takes less than a minute, and you can rename or reshuffle teams whenever you like.
What teams give you
- Routing. A conversation can be assigned to a team so the right people pick it up, rather than sitting unassigned while everyone assumes somebody else will take it.
- A view of your own group. The My Teams tab in the inbox shows conversations assigned to teams you belong to.
- Somewhere for rules to point. An automation that routes billing questions needs a Billing team to route them to.
What presence is
Whether somebody is at their desk. It shows as a coloured dot beside their name and as a status on your own profile at the bottom of the sidebar.
The two states you will see are Active and Away, alongside whether that person is connected.
The live overview
Settings, then Members, then Presence shows a real-time table of everyone: their status, whether they are connected, and how long they have been that way.
It is the honest answer to "is anyone actually on the inbox right now?", which is worth knowing before you promise a customer a fast reply.
Automatic Away
By default, people are moved to Away automatically once their tabs have been hidden or disconnected for a set number of minutes. The default is ten, unless you change it.
You can turn this off, which keeps every status manual. That is a worse default for most teams: manual statuses drift, and a permanently "Active" colleague who went home at five is misleading to everybody.
- 1Go to Settings, then Members, then Presence.
- 2Use Use automatic Away to turn the behaviour on or off.
- 3Set Automatic Away to the number of minutes that suits how your team works.
Away reasons
When somebody sets themselves to Away they can pick a reason, from a list you control. Gruvi starts you with four: in a meeting, on a break, lunch, and be right back. You can add up to twenty.
The reasons are worth customising to how your team actually works. "On a call", "Doing escalations", "End of shift" tell colleagues something useful; a generic Away does not.
Why presence matters to customers
It is not only internal. On live chat, when teammate names are shown to customers and that teammate is out of office, customers are also told the day they return.
So an accurate presence setup does something real: it turns "nobody is answering" into "Sam is back on Tuesday", which is a far better experience for somebody waiting. ---