Teammates can set their status to Active or Away. When away mode is enabled, they can also enable the Reassign replies option. Use this article to manage your own availability as a teammate, configure workspace-wide away reasons as a manager, or monitor your team's real-time status.
Active: We recommend setting the status to active when the teammate is scheduled to work and is available to receive new conversations.
Away: We recommend setting the status to away when the teammate is occupied with something else for a short while during their shift. It could be a meeting, coaching other teammates, or a break.
Reassign replies: We recommend enabling the reassign replies option when a teammate ends their shift and when they are going away for several days. It’s important when teammates won’t be able to respond to conversations already assigned to them.
The effect of setting a teammate’s status to away
Here’s what happens when a teammate sets their status to away:
Balanced assignment — stops sending them new conversations, always. Intercom sorts the team into “present” and “away” buckets, and only present teammates get new work. There’s no setting to change this.
Round robin — also skips them by default. New conversations rotate through the available teammates and away ones are left out.
The exception — a team can turn on a setting “Assign conversations to teammates even if they're away or away & reassigning replies.” so that round robin keeps handing conversations to away teammates. It’s off unless someone switches it on, and it’s set per team, so one team can enable it without affecting others.
In short: away means “don’t give me new conversations” for both methods — except a team can deliberately override that for round robin only.
Note: Balanced assignment is available on the Expert plan. Round robin is available on the Advanced and Expert plans.
Teammates who belong to multiple workspaces can configure the away status, conversation reassignment and away status reasons independently per-workspace. Changing their status in one workspace, doesn’t impact the status in the other workspace.
Customers can see the teammate’s status (active or away) within the conversation’s view in the Messenger which helps to set the right expectation.
When a teammate has no Intercom tabs open in the web app for more than 5 mins, they appear as Away in the Messenger. However, it doesn’t change their actual status in Intercom and doesn’t impact automatic conversations assignment.
Away status on Proactive Support messages
If an outbound Message like a Chat or Post is live on your website and the teammate it appears from is automatically set to Away after being inactive for more than 5 minutes or have manually turned on their Away mode, their status on the Messenger will show as 'active in the last 15m' or Away.
The effect of enabling the reassign replies option
When a teammate sets their status to Away and enables Reassign replies, all Away mode effects still apply — balanced assignment stops assigning new conversations to them, and by default round robin does too — and existing conversations are also automatically reassigned when a customer replies.
In addition, if a customer replies to a conversation assigned to a teammate while they have the Reassign replies option enabled:
If the default assignee for the workspace is a teammate, the conversation will be automatically reassigned to that teammate regardless of which team inbox the conversation is currently in.
If the default assignee is a team inbox, only the assigned teammate is automatically unassigned. The conversation remains in its current team inbox — it does not move to the default assignee team inbox. If the current team inbox uses balanced assignment, an available teammate will be assigned to it automatically.
Tip: If you prefer conversations to remain in their current team inbox (with only the teammate unassigned) rather than being routed to a specific teammate, set the default assignee to a team inbox instead of a teammate.
Using Intercom's API (application programming interface) and webhooks (real-time event notifications), you can automatically reassign conversations after a period of teammate inactivity. This requires custom code on your end.
Subscribe to the conversation.user.created webhook topic to receive a conversation ID whenever a new inbound message arrives.
Create a scheduled task to monitor those conversations for a teammate reply by subscribing to the conversation.admin.replied webhook topic.
If no teammate reply is received within your chosen time window, reassign the conversation to another teammate using the Conversations API endpoint. The reassigned teammate receives the conversation in their inbox automatically.
Setting an away reason
Teammates can also specify a reason when they set their status to away. These reasons appear in the real-time dashboard and custom reports, giving managers visibility into why teammates are unavailable.
New workspaces will come with 9 default Away reasons for immediate use.
Away statuses matching default Intercom-provided reasons are automatically translated, ensuring consistency across multilingual teams.
Reporting will continue to work with custom reasons.
Labels for away reasons are preserved as they were at the time of writing, to maintain historical accuracy for your activity logs.
Workspaces can have up to 100 active reasons (archived reasons don't count toward the limit), with a minimum of 3 active reasons required at all times.
Customize away reasons
You can create, rename, archive, and translate Away reasons tailored to your workspace’s specific needs. This enables your teammates to select a reason better aligned with business, which will help your company better understand teammate availability, and track productivity.
Away reason names must be unique. If you wish to reuse labels, you must rename or unarchive and rename the archived reason before creating a new reason with the original label.
Go to Settings > Inbox > Assignments. Then, scroll to the bottom of the General page and click Customize away reasons.
In this section, you can:
Create: Add new reasons by clicking New reason and entering the desired name.
Rename: Modify existing reasons by clicking the edit icon next the reason's name.
Archive: Remove reasons no longer needed by clicking the Archive icon in red.
Archived reasons remain visible for teammates currently set to them.
Archived reasons are hidden from customers.
Finally, click Save after making your changes. 🎉
These settings apply to your entire workspace, not individual teams.
Require a reason with Away mode
To ensure teammates provide a reason when setting their status to "Away", go to Settings > Inbox > Assignments. Then, toggle on Make away reasons mandatory. The setting saves automatically.
Adjust phone settings
If your workspace has phone enabled, certain reasons are used by the system to set teammates to Away mode automatically while on a call, coaching, or wrapping up. Those reasons can not be archived, and can only be renamed.
Away reasons used by the phone channel are labeled Used by Phone channel in the away reason settings. These reasons can be edited (renamed) but not archived.
To remove these reasons, you’ll need to update your phone settings:
On a call – To remove this, you’ll need to completely disable phone by removing all phone numbers.
Coaching – To remove this, disable ‘Listen in on calls’.
Call wrap up – To remove this, disable ‘Wrap up time’.
A specific reason cannot be selected for phone functionality, but the name and label of the reason can be updated once these reasons are used by phone.
Using the API to set a teammate’s away reason
You can use the API to programmatically set teammates to Away, specifying custom away reasons directly. Developers can also subscribe to the webhook topic admin.activity_log_event.created to capture activity log events programmatically.
Monitoring teammate status & capacity
Support managers also have an overview of teammates’ status and away reasons. This is a great tool for managers to make fast decisions when faced with an increased backlog.
Monitor team status with the real-time dashboard
Note: The real-time dashboard is only available on the Expert plan. It also requires the "Can access real-time dashboard" permission.
In the inboxes tab of the real-time dashboard, you can see the number of active teammates per inbox. This is useful when used in conjunction with the number of unassigned conversations. It helps managers assess the team’s ability to handle the backlog.
In addition, in the teammates tab, you can see the current status, away reason, and time on status of all teammates who match the applied filter. You can also view the last seen time for each teammate and differentiate statuses as Active/Online, Away, or Away & Reassigning.
You can also mouse over the numbers in the summary to see a breakdown of the away reasons.
Managers can also change a teammate's status directly from the real-time dashboard — for example, if a teammate forgot to update their own status.
This action requires the Can change status permission.
Note: If a teammate's number of conversations assigned per active time appears unusually high, it could be that they are not correctly changing their activity status in the inbox — which would explain the behavior. Ensuring teammates set their status to Away when unavailable will keep this metric accurate.
Teammates settings
You can also find the teammates status and away reasons in Settings > Workspace > Teammates. Additionally, you can navigate to Settings > Inbox > Assignment > Teammate Assignment Limit to filter by availability (Active, Away, or Away & Reassigning) using the Assignment Limits table.
Teammates with the "Can change status" permission can modify other teammates' status, however, they also require "Can manage teammates, seats and permissions" to access this page.
Note: Status-duration metrics like "Teammate Time Active" cannot be filtered by office hours directly. To calculate totals within specific hours (e.g., 7 AM–7 PM CST), export the data and manually exclude time outside your support schedule.
Historical status reporting
To analyze past teammate statuses or availability changes, you can use the following tools:
Teammate Activity Logs:
Go to Settings > Workspace > Teammates > Activity Logs.
Filter by teammate, date range, or activity type (e.g., "Messenger availability changed").
This log provides detailed timestamps for status changes, login activities, and more.
Note: Away reasons are not visible in Teammate Activity Logs. To see which reason a teammate selected, use the Teammates tab of the real-time dashboard (Expert plan).
Custom Reports:
Navigate to Reports > New Report > Create Your Own.
Add metrics such as "Teammate Time Active," "Teammate Time Away," and "Teammate Time Away & Reassign."
Segment by teammate and set your desired date range.
Optionally, include the "Away Reason" metric for more detailed insights.
What’s next?
Monitor your most important metrics in one place: the real-time dashboard.
Set your reply time to let customers know when your team usually responds to conversations.
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