User Availability Toggle

User Availability Toggles allow your team members to toggle themselves on / offline using the Widget. This optional feature allows for more fine-grained control over availability, for example your reps will be able to mark themselves as unavailable during a meeting. You enable this feature on the Distribution Settings page. 

Why use the toggle for sales teams? For some companies, time to contact is critical. Within your sales operation having leads being assigned to reps who are not currently working can reduce conversion rates. The toggle allows these reps to let Distribution Engine know they won't be responding and hence won't waste leads that other people could be chasing up.

Overview

To control the availability of teams and team members, Distribution Engine offers Distribution Holidays (to shut down entire teams by region), Distribution OoO (for individual absences) and Distribution hours (at the team and user level and Shift levels). All these limit the availability of the teams and their members. Some customers, however, need more fine grained control over availability during the course of the day. To achieve this we have user availability toggle functionality, which is a toggle on the widget allowing reps to toggle in and out. They will only receive assignments when toggled in.

Configuring User Availability Toggles

To enable user availability toggles, navigate to the Distribution Settings page and enable 'User Availability Toggles'.

Toggle Off Reasons

You can optionally make your reps specify a reason for toggling offline. This is controlled by the "Require reason for toggle off" setting. Once enabled, you can then define a list of reasons that your reps can choose from when toggling off. These reasons are visible from the User Activity History report (below) and the User Activity chart on the analytics tab.

Timer Toggles

Timer toggles let your users pause availability for a set duration, then automatically resume, giving your team more flexibility in managing their availability throughout the day. This feature can be enabled from the Distribution Settings page.

Once enabled, you can define specific toggle durations for your team to choose from—for instance, you might want to allow them to toggle off for an hour during their lunch break or for 15 minutes during a quick break.

If you want to maintain control over the duration options, select 'Use pre-defined durations only' to ensure your users can only choose from the list you've created. Without this restriction, users will have the flexibility to enter their own custom duration.

For teams that require strict accountability, you can enable 'Timer toggles only' to prevent users from toggling on and off without specifying a duration. Note that managers and admins will still retain access to the standard toggle functionality regardless of this setting.

Toggle status at start/end of day

You can ensure that all users start and end the working day in the same toggle state, either on or off, by using the 'Toggle status at start of day' and 'Toggle status at end of day' settings, found on the Distribution Settings page. These features set each user's toggle status to a set value either at the start or end of their shift.

Selecting 'No Change' will mean that each user's toggle status will be the same at the start of a working day as it was at the end of the previous working day. Selecting 'Always toggle on/off' will alter all user's toggle status to on or off as appropriate at the end of their last shift on the previous working day.

This is useful in cases where you want to ensure that assignments at the start of a shift are made appropriately - either ensuring users need to manually toggle on when they are available at the start of their shift instead of relying on their state at the end of their last shift, or making sure users are automatically toggled on to avoid instances where someone was toggled off at the end of their previous shift.

How does the toggle work with other availability settings?

The user login mode toggle is at the bottom of the pile in terms of availability settings. It is only for controlling availability when the team member is allowed to be online based on their holidays, Out of Office or shift hours. If a team member is marked out of office based on any of these then the toggle will have no effect. 

Manager view

As a manager or admin, you can see and override the current toggle status on the team member page for a team.

Audit trail

All toggle activity is logged, including whether a rep or their manager performed the action.

You can also view the toggle activity of the users by going to the User activity history report.

• Go to reports tab
• Distribution Engine reports folder
• User activity history report