Real-time agent availability, driven by an open session plus recent activity, so routing and admins know who’s actually here.
Presence answers a simple question — who is online right now? — but answers it from signals rather than a manual toggle. An open session and recent activity mark an agent as present; idle time or a closed tab flips them to away. That live read is what lets work go only to people who can actually pick it up.
Why it matters
Routing rules are only as good as the availability data behind them. If the system assigns a conversation to someone who logged off an hour ago, it sits unanswered and the customer waits. Presence keeps round-robin honest by skipping agents who aren’t there, and it gives admins a true read on capacity during a spike.
How it works
- Session signal — an open, authenticated session in the app counts as a baseline for being present.
- Activity signal — recent actions (viewing tickets, typing, navigating) confirm the agent is actually active, not just logged in.
- Idle and offline — after a period with no activity, or when the session closes, presence flips to away so routing stops sending new work.
This is why a manual toggle alone is fragile: it drifts out of date the moment someone forgets to flip it — they look online while at lunch, or offline while heads-down. Tying presence purely to an open tab has the opposite problem, since a forgotten background tab keeps someone “present” long after they’ve left. Combining a session signal with recent activity, and a sensible idle timeout, avoids both extremes.
A concrete example
A SaaS support desk runs a small live-chat team. When two of four agents step away for a standup, presence marks them away after a short idle window, so incoming chats route only to the two still active — no conversation lands in an empty seat. Pair this with agent-collision signals and the team avoids both dropped and doubled-up replies.
How Cherryrise handles it
Cherryrise derives presence from an open session plus recent activity and uses it to drive assignment in the shared inbox, so routing and admins see who’s genuinely available rather than relying on a status anyone forgets to set.