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Create and manage workstreams

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Important

Power Virtual Agents capabilities and features are now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio following significant investments in generative AI and enhanced integrations across Microsoft Copilot.

Some articles and screenshots might refer to Power Virtual Agents while we update documentation and training content.

A workstream is a container to enrich, route, and assign work items, and can be associated with a channel, such as live chat, voice, or case.

The workstream can belong to multiple channels of the same type, like multiple chat channels. In this case, all the conversations from these channels inherit the routing and work assignment settings of the workstream they belong to.

The workstream can be one of the following types:

  • Messaging: To route conversations from live chat, SMS, social, and Microsoft Teams channels.
  • Record: To route records, such as case, email, and activity.
  • Voice: To route calls made to support numbers listed on the customer portal. More information: Introduction to the voice channel

Important

Unified routing must be enabled in the service configuration settings for records to be routed using unified routing. More information: Provision unified routing

Prerequisite

The administrator who configures workstreams must be a system administrator or have permissions to access and modify secure columns.

Create a workstream

You can create workstreams for unified routing in the Customer Service admin center app.

  1. In the site map of admin center, select Workstreams in Customer support.

  2. Select New workstream.

  3. In the Create a workstream dialog, enter the following details:

    • Name: Enter an intuitive name, such as Contoso chat workstream.

    • Type: Select one of the following types:

      • Messaging
      • Record
      • Voice

    • Channel: This box appears if you've selected the type as Messaging. Select a channel from the list. If you select Chat, the Make chats persistent checkbox appears. Select the checkbox if you want to configure persistent chat. Also make sure that you select Keep same agent for entire conversation in the Work distribution settings of the workstream. More information: Configure persistent chat

    • Record: This box appears if you've selected the type as Record. Select the record from the list. More information: Set up record routing

    • Work distribution mode: Select Push or Pick. You can't edit this setting later.

      • In Push mode, a work item is dispatched to agents automatically using a message alert. You can configure the push work item to be explicitly picked up. For voice, only push mode is available.
      • In Pick mode, a work item is dispatched to agents when they explicitly pick the work item from the Open work items in the agent dashboard.

    • In Fallback queue, select one of the following options:

      • Create new: Enter a queue name to which work items will be sent when no queue is identified in the the route-to-queue rules. You'll need to add users to the queue after creating the workstream.
      • Choose existing: Select an existing queue from the dropdown list. By default, the out-of-the-box queue for the selected channel type is selected.

      More information: Fallback queues

      Settings for creating workstream for live chat.

  4. Select Create. The workstream that you created is displayed with the option to configure the selected channel instance.

  5. Perform the steps outlined in one of the following sections depending on the channel that you've selected.

Note

If asynchronous plug-ins are installed but disabled in your organization, ensure that you set the value of "DisabledForAsyncProcessing" to "No" to avoid issues when you're creating workstreams.

Configure routing rules

Routing rules for a workstream consist of work classification rules and route-to-queue rules. To learn about configure routing rules, see the following articles:

Configure work distribution

In the Work distribution area of a workstream, you can either accept the default settings or select See more and update the following options:

  • Auto-close after inactivity: Select a time period after which inactive conversations will be moved to the closed state automatically. This option is available for only persistent chat, SMS, social, and Microsoft Teams channels.

  • Work distribution mode: The option that you selected in step 3 is displayed and can't be edited.

  • Capacity: Select one of the following options. More information: Create and manage capacity profiles

    • Unit based: Enter a value if your organization has configured unit-based capacity.
    • Profile based: Specify a profile in the list if your organization has configured profile-based capacity.

  • Block capacity for wrap up: Select a duration to block capacity when the agent is in Wrap-up state, such as 1 minute or 60 minutes. After the specified duration, agent capacity is released and presence is automatically reset. By default, Always block is selected, where agent capacity is blocked as long as the conversation is in Wrap-up state. You can also select Don't block, where agent capacity is released immediately, when the conversation moves to the Wrap-up state.

    Note

    If you've selected End of Day mode in capacity profile, agent capacity won't be reset when the duration selected in the Block capacity for wrap up field is over.

  • Allowed presences: Select the presence statuses in which agents can be assigned work. Don't select the Inactive and Do not disturb statuses if you don't want to assign new work items to agents when they miss or reject notifications.

  • Default skill matching algorithm: Select Exact Match, Closest Match, or None.

  • Keep same agent for entire conversation: Set the toggle to Yes if you want the conversation to remain assigned to the originally assigned agent. More information: Agent affinity

Configure advanced settings

For a selected workstream, expand Advanced settings to configure the following options:

Add a bot to a workstream

To add a bot to a workstream, you must configure the bot and make it available for selection.

For Copilot Studio bots, see Connect omnichannel to your Copilot Studio bot. For Azure bots, see Integrate Azure bots with Omnichannel for Customer Service.

  1. In Customer Service admin center, go to Workstreams, and select a workstream.
  2. For the selected workstream and channel, in the Bot area, select Add bot.
  3. In the Add a bot dialog, select the required bot from the Name dropdown list, and then select Save and close.

When a work item needs to be assigned, the classification rules are run and the work distribution system checks and routes the work item to the bot, if the selected workstream has a bot. After a bot is added to the workstream, the incoming work item is first routed to the selected bot at runtime.

Note

  • Bots can receive conversations only if they're added to push-based workstreams.
  • We recommend that you don't add bots to workstreams that are meant for record routing.

Manage workstreams

You can manage workstreams on the workstreams page of any of the Customer Service admin apps.

Select a workstream to perform any of the following actions:

  • Edit: Lets you edit the workstream, such as add a new channel or update the existing settings.
  • Copy: Lets you create a copy of the workstream with all the properties, such as the rules, so that you can reuse the configured workstream in another organization. The copied workstream name is prefixed with "Copy of "<workstream>.
  • Delete: Lets you delete the workstream if you no longer need it in your organization. You can't delete workstreams that are used in intake rules for record routing. You'll be prompted to remove the dependencies and then try to delete the workstream.
  • Fallback queue: Select an existing queue or create a queue to set as the fallback queue. More information: Fallback queues

Agent affinity

The agent affinity feature ensures that work items are assigned to the agents based on their work history. Agent affinity ensures that conversations are automatically reassigned to the same agent, irrespective of the agent's capacity and presence.

The feature is enabled by default for persistent chat, SMS, social channels, and Microsoft Teams. In these channels, when a conversation moves from the waiting to active state, it might not get assigned to the same agent who had previously handled it. You can set the Keep same agent for entire conversation toggle to Yes when you configure the work distribution for the workstream to reassign the conversation to the agent. This helps save the effort to reorient the agent or set the context about the customer issue again.

However, for live chat, there's no waiting state. So, when the state of the conversation changes from active to open state, it'll be reassigned to the same agent. The agent can, however, choose to reject the assigned conversation via the notification pane.

Note

Agent affinity is applicable only for push type of work distribution.

Associate templates

You can keep the default templates for sessions and notifications or update to use custom templates. More information: Associate templates with workstreams

See also

Configure persistent chat
Set up record routing
Configure routing for email records
Manage users in Omnichannel for Customer Service
Work with queues
Automatically identify customers using pre-chat responses