Agents, teams & roles
Tola's permission model has three layers: what role someone has, which channels they can see, and which team they belong to. Get these right early — retrofitting access control onto a busy account is far more annoying than setting it up on day one.
Agents
An agent is a person who works in Tola. Invite them under Settings → Agents → Add agent with their name, email and role. They receive an invitation and set their own password.
Each agent has a profile with their display name, avatar, email signature, notification preferences and interface language. Signatures matter more than they sound — they are what customers see on every email reply.
Availability
Agents set themselves online, busy or offline. This is not decorative:
- Auto-assignment only routes to online agents.
- Voice calls only ring available agents.
- The live chat widget can show whether anyone is around.
If your team forgets to set it, availability can follow activity instead. Either way, decide which model you are using and tell people — half a team on manual and half on automatic produces routing nobody can explain.
Built-in roles
- Name
Administrator- Type
- everything
- Description
Full access: all conversations, all settings, channels, billing, reports, integrations and team management.
- Name
Agent- Type
- conversations
- Description
Works conversations in the channels they are assigned to. Cannot change account settings, add channels or manage other agents.
Most accounts need very few administrators. Two is usually right: one primary, one backup.
Custom roles
When administrator is too much and agent is too little, build a custom role from these permissions:
- Name
Manage all conversations- Type
- the full queue
- Description
Can work every conversation in the channels they have access to.
- Name
Manage unassigned conversations- Type
- the shared pool
- Description
Can see and pick up conversations nobody owns yet, and assign them to themselves.
- Name
Manage participating conversations- Type
- their own only
- Description
Can only work conversations they have been assigned or added to. The tightest option.
- Name
Manage contacts- Type
- customer records
- Description
Can view and edit contacts and companies.
- Name
Manage reports- Type
- analytics
- Description
Can open reports. Useful for managers who do not answer conversations themselves.
- Name
Manage knowledge base- Type
- help center
- Description
Can write and publish help center articles.
Two combinations cover most needs. A specialist — an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer brought in occasionally — gets participating conversations only, so they see what has been handed to them and nothing else. A team lead gets all conversations, contacts and reports, so they can run the queue and see the numbers without being able to change account settings or billing.
Permissions are additive, so the widest one wins. Granting "manage all conversations" alongside "manage participating conversations" gives the person full access — the narrower permission has no restraining effect once the broader one is on.
Channel-level access
Roles say what someone can do. Channel access says where they can do it.
Every channel has its own agent list. An agent who is not on a channel's list cannot see its conversations at all, whatever their role. This is how you keep a recruitment inbox away from the support team, or a VIP channel restricted to two senior people.
Check this list whenever someone joins or leaves. It is the setting most often forgotten, in both directions.
Teams
Teams group agents so that work can be routed to a group rather than to a named person — Billing, Onboarding, Tier 2, Nepali-speaking.
Teams give you:
- Assignment to a group, by hand or from a workflow, so nothing waits on one individual being online.
- A team view in the sidebar with its own unread count.
- Team reports, so you can compare load and response times across groups.
- An auto-assign option, so conversations routed to the team distribute within it.
An agent can belong to more than one team.
Bots
A bot is a non-human participant in the inbox — a scripted flow that collects an order number before a human picks the conversation up, or a connection to one of your own systems.
Bots have deliberately limited access, and they can hand a conversation to a person at any point. That is the pattern worth following: let the bot handle the strictly predictable part and pass everything else to a human. For answering real questions rather than following a script, see Tola AI.
A sensible starting structure
For a team of five to fifteen people, this holds up well:
- Two administrators. No more.
- Everyone else an agent, with channel access matched to what they actually work on.
- Teams by topic, not seniority — Billing and Technical beat Tier 1 and Tier 2, because topic routing survives people changing jobs.
- One custom role for managers with reports and contacts but not settings.
- Review channel access quarterly. It drifts.