What Chat Group Rank, Grade, and Chat Count mean

At the bottom of the chat group modification screen there is a small section listing every agent attached to the group with three numbers next to each one: a rank, a grade, and a chat count. The first two control who gets a chat first, and the third is just a running total of how many chats that agent has handled from this group today. Together they let you read, at a glance, how work is being shared out.

Rank decides the order

Rank is the priority an Agent holds inside this chat group. When a chat comes in and more than one agent is free, the higher-ranked agent gets it first. You use this to keep your strongest people on the front line and let the rest act as overflow. Two agents with the same rank are treated as equals, so ties fall through to the grade.

flowchart TD
  A["Chat arrives at group"] --> B["Find free agents"]
  B --> C{"Compare ranks"}
  C -->|Higher rank free| D["Send to highest rank"]
  C -->|Ranks tied| E["Compare grades"]
  E --> F["Grade weights the random pick"]
  D --> G["Chat count for that agent goes up by one"]
  F --> G

Grade weights the random pick

Grade comes into play when several agents share the same rank. Instead of always picking the same person, VICIdial uses the grade as a weight on a random draw, so an agent with a higher grade is more likely to be chosen but not guaranteed every time. The effect is that work spreads across an equally-ranked tier without one agent soaking up everything. If you only ever set rank and never touch grade, the group still works, you just lose that finer balancing within a tier.

Chat count is a daily tally

Chat count is read-only. It shows how many chats each agent has taken from this group for the day and resets on its own. It does not feed routing in any way. It is there so a manager can open the group, glance down the list, and see whether the load is landing where the ranks say it should. If your top-ranked agent has a low count while a low-ranked one is buried, that is a sign your ranks no longer match who is actually logged in.

How it ties together

Rank and grade are the chat-group equivalent of the Agent rank idea you already use on inbound calls. They sit underneath the larger routing settings: a chat group with a high Queue priority wins against other groups first, and only after that does rank decide which agent inside the group takes the chat. Think of priority as picking the queue and rank as picking the person.

For the full routing picture across chat, email, and voice, read the VICIdial inbound email and chat guide, and for the email-side version of these exact fields see what email group rank, grade, and count mean. If you would rather skip the Ingroup tuning and start from a sane default, our managed VICIdial plans hand you a working box you can adjust from there.