Understanding agents and knowing how to manage them is essential to using Sendbird Desk efficiently. This guide will equip you with the fundamentals you need to know about agents.

This user guide contains the following information:

Agent, admin, and bot

Agents are largely divided into two categories: live agents and virtual agents. Live agents consist of human agents whose roles are divided into Admin and Agent. Virtual agents is another term used to describe Bots so that they can be distinguished from human agents. The following shows differences between the two live agent roles and a more detailed breakdown of bots.

Agent: While an agent is an umbrella term used to refer to all types of agents, including admins and bots, non-admin agents who use the agent view of the dashboard are also simply referred to as agents.
Admin: Admin is an agent who has administrative privileges to manage overall dashboard settings, tickets, and agents and uses the admin view of the dashboard. Admins can have their own tickets and interact with customers as agents can. The shield icon next to the agent name indicates an admin role.

Admin display name with a shield icon

Bot: Bots are automated agents that handle repetitive tasks and simple inquiries, allowing live agents to address more complex issues. You can create two types of bots on the dashboard.
- Custom bot: You can integrate your own chatbot or a third-party bot to Sendbird Desk by registering a webhook URL.
- FAQ bot: Sendbird Desk’s FAQ bot parses through the uploaded CSV file to answer frequently asked questions. To learn how to create an FAQ bot and upload CSV files, see the user guide for FAQ bots.

Bots can be identified by the robot icon next to their display name.

Bot display name with a robot icon

Teams

Agents can be divided into teams and receive tickets based on their teams. In Settings > Teams, admins can create a team and designate an agent to the team. By default, the newly created agent’s account falls under the Default team.

Agents can belong to more than one team and should belong to at least one team to receive tickets through the auto ticket routing function. If an agent doesn’t belong to any team, they can only receive manually transferred tickets.

Keep in mind that the team of a ticket and that of a ticket’s assignee isn’t always the same. When a ticket is transferred to an agent in a different team, the assignee of the ticket changes but the ticket’s assigned team remains unchanged. To learn more about how to assign tickets to a team, see the Team assignment guide.