Understanding the Difference Between Line Status and Presence Status

When managing agents in babelforce, it's essential to differentiate between Line Status and Presence Status, as they serve distinct purposes and influence agent availability in different ways.

Line Status

The Line Status reflects the state of an agent's telephone line. It is automatically set by the system and indicates whether the line is:

• Available (active): The line is free and ready to receive calls.
• Unavailable (Inactive, Busy, or In-call): These statuses are equivalent and mean that the line is not free to handle new calls.

For a detailed explanation of what each status means in the Line Status, refer to this article: What is the Line Status?. 

Presence Status

The Presence Status represents an agent’s overall availability to handle calls. This status can be manually adjusted by the agent and typically includes:

• Available: The agent is ready to take calls.
• Unavailable: The agent cannot take calls at the moment

How These Statuses Impact Agent Behavior

In your flow, you will often route call flows based on agent availability. For this purpose, you have two similar expressions you can use:

• agents.enabled
• agents.available

The distinction between the two is as follows:

Expression: "agents.enabled" 

The agents.enabled attribute is determined only by the Presence Status.

• Even if the Line Status shows "in-call," the agent will be considered "enabled" as long as the Presence Status is set to "available."

Expression: "agents.available"

The agents.available attribute considers both the Line Status and the Presence Status.

• An agent is marked as "available" only if their Presence Status is "available" and their Line Status is not "in-call."
• If the Line Status is "in-call," the agent will not be marked as "available," even if the Presence Status is set to "available."

Key Takeaway

• Line Status is automatically managed by the system and reflects the technical state of the agent’s phone line.
• Presence Status is manually managed and indicates the agent’s willingness or ability to handle calls.
• agents.enabled depends solely on Presence Status.
• agents.available requires both Line Status and Presence Status to align for the agent to be considered truly available for new calls.