Your LiveAgent panel has the ability to indicate how many customers are waiting in the chat or call queue. This is displayed in the top-right corner of your panel.
Once every agent who is available for chats/calls has his slots full at one moment, further customers have to wait until one of these slots gets free. In order to define the number of chats that agents can handle at the same time, navigate to Configuration --> Agents --> Edit any agent --> Settings (tab) --> Max chat load.
If there is a queue of waiting customers and your agent closes one chat/call, another will start ringing. By default, this happens immediately, but you have an option to set a Breathing Time for your agents between 2 chats/calls. Breathing time can be defined in Configuration --> Chat --> Chat settings
In case of calls, navigate to Configuration --> Call --> Settings where you are able to define the Maximum queue time (Maximum number of seconds a call can stay in the queue. After this time the call continues in the offline section of IVR) or Breathing time.
Furthermore, you can also define the maximum customers allowed in the chat queue. To do so, you need to edit any of your chat buttons and locate the Max queue length field within the Overview tab. Your online chat button can act as an offline button or it can be completely hidden if there are too many people waiting in the chat queue. This helps eliminate customer’s frustration when the chat queue is long. Naturally, when the queue is back within the limit, the live chat button appears again with the online status.
If you don´t want your customer to wait in the queue, you can pick up the chat/call by clicking on the queue indicator regardless of the number of chats you currently have or your chat/call availability status. Optionally, you can pick the chat directly from the Chats --> Chat overview section