The Queues screen is used for configuring queues and how they handle incoming calls to your office.
For example, you can specify how many queues you want and for what (taxi office, admin, accounts etc.), each with its own unique number, and you can also add or remove agents from the queues to control which calls are answered by agents. The queues themselves can also be configured to use different ring strategies such as “Ring All”, “Round Robin memory” or “Least Recent”.
To access this screen:
- Click on Queues from the Routing menu.
Create a queue
To create a new queue:
- Click on Create New Queue in the top-right.
- Configure your queue settings.
- Then click Save.
- Name: Enter a unique name to identify the queue.
- Strategy: Select how calls should be delivered to agents in the queue.
- Terminator: Select what happens (destination) when the ring time ends. (Note: Please do not return calls to the same queue as this will cause a loop and system stability issues.)
- Queue Ring Time: Set the total time in seconds a call will ring in the queue before following the terminator mentioned above.
- Agent Ring Time: Set the total time in seconds that a call will ring an agent in the queue before moving to the next available agent.
- Wrap Up Time: Set the minimum time in seconds an agent will have before another call in queue may ring at the handset.
- Missed Time in Queue: Set the minimum time a call must ring in the queue before it will be considered a missed call in call reporting.
- Queue Priority: If you have more than one queue being answered by your agents, this allows you to set a higher/lower priority for this queue.
- Force Next Step Ring instead of MOH: Check this if you wish the caller to hear a ringing tone whilst in the call queue.
- Music on Hold: This setting is only used when the 'Ring' instead of the MOH option above is not selected. It allows you to select the MOH class you wish the caller to hear whilst in the call queue.
- Announcement Frequency: Set how often a customer is advised of their queue position and an estimated wait time before their call is answered. (Note: The announcement is played only if estimated time to answer is greater than 1 min).
- Hold Time: Check this to notify the customer how long they can expect to wait until their call is answered and works alongside the setting above.
- Auto pause Agents who miss calls: When checked, the system will automatically place any Agent into a pause status when they have bounced three consecutive calls, forcing the agent to un-pause themselves to continue taking calls.
- Play beep to agents before connecting call: Enables a soft tone in the agent’s headset before a call is delivered to them. (Note: This is used mostly in conjunction with agents enabled with auto-answer enabled.)
- Press 1 goes back to IVR: If selected this allows a caller who is ringing to a queue to press 1 on their keypad to get back to the IVR at any time. (Note: You will need to add/change the wording of IVR so the customer knows the option exists.)
- Drop back to IVR after time period: If a customer is ringing into a queue you can set the caller to be directed to the IVR after the timeout below.
- Drop back to IVR after: This sets the timeout (sec) of the drop back to IVR.
- IVR Menu to go back to: With this option, you can select the same or a different IVR menu the caller automatically drops back to.
- Caller Priority: Toggle on or off and then apply your settings to New Caller, Whitelisted, Low Reliability, and Med/High Caller Priority.
- Missed Call Back: When a customer misses a call, the system should call back the missed caller and offer them the chance to speak to an operator, the system should then reserve a free operator to connect the call or put the call as the next call to be answered.
- Missed Call Back threshold: To qualify for a missed call call-back the customer must have been in the queue for ‘X’ seconds, ‘X’ is a variable that can be set by the customer on the system, the default setting should be ’60 seconds’.
Queue members
To toggle queue members (agents):
- Click on the (People) icon under the Queue Members column.
- Click to toggle a member In or Out of the queue.
- Then click Close.